Discussing Studies and Statistics

This is an upper-intermediate PDF worksheet about discussing studies and statistics. Students will warm up with some general conversation questions about statistics and then read and discuss an interesting study about children being told they need to wait to eat candy. After that the class will learn some useful vocabulary for the subject and then complete 8 incomplete statistics with the vocabulary they have learned. All of the 8 statistics are technically true, but 3 of them are misleading. Students will then try to guess or figure out which statistics are misleading and why. Afterwords they will read a text explaining the which 3 statistics were misleading and how. In the final exercise the students will watch a video which discusses 3 studies that were used to produce misleading headlines. The class will watch the video which describes the videos, and pause after each study is described. The class will then try to figure out how the headline is misleading. There is an optional homework exercise in which students have to find 2 real statistics and create one fake one and see if their classmates can guess the fake fact.

This worksheet will work well with any B2 level class, but will work particularly well with any business English class in which the participants work with figures or statistics.

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