Chart assignment

Charts to read and discuss

Read each chart, then answer its questions. Every chart shows its source and date; open it for a table of the numbers and the data to download.

  1. Why are drugs recalled?
  2. What is the unemployment rate in each country?

Chart 1 of 2 · Food and drug safety

Why are drugs recalled?

The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.

The most common reason in the 4,274 drug recalls the FDA classified from 2013 through 2025 was “not made under good manufacturing practices”: 673 recalls, about 16%. Next come “impurities or contamination” (542), “mix-ups and label errors” (504) and “can't be shown to be sterile” (495). Chartly grouped FDA's written reasons by their key words; each recall counts once, under its main reason.

Questions to discuss

  1. In one sentence of your own, what does this chart show?
  2. Find the biggest change or difference in the chart. What might explain it?
  3. Who collected these numbers, and how recent are they? What else would you want to know before drawing a conclusion?

Source: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Enforcement Reports (openFDA drug recall data) (Public domain (U.S. government work); source U.S. Food and Drug Administration, openFDA) · Data as of Dec 31, 2025

Open the chart and its numbers

Chart 2 of 2 · World

What is the unemployment rate in each country?

The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.

In 2025, 4.2% of workers in the United States were unemployed, against 4.8% worldwide; the highest rate was 34.2% in Eswatini, and the lowest 0.1%, in Qatar. Search 182 countries and territories. These are the International Labour Organization's estimates, which count people without work who are looking for it and fill gaps where a country runs no regular survey, so they can differ from a country's own figures.

How to read this chart

Each bar is the share of a country's workers who have no job and are looking for one, estimated by the International Labour Organization. The dashed line is the world. People who aren't looking for work, such as students and retirees, aren't counted as unemployed at all.

Questions to discuss

  1. Is the United States above or below the world rate, and by about how many percentage points?
  2. A country can have low unemployment while many people earn very little. How is that possible?
  3. Why would someone who has given up looking for work not count as unemployed? Does that make the number more or less useful?

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