In this lesson, students are reminded of how to interpret two-way tables. In statistics, a variable is a characteristic that can take on different values. Students encounter the term categorical variable, which is a variable that represents data which can be divided into groups or categories. Two-way tables are used to organize data from two categorical variables.

In grade 8, students had the opportunity to use two-way tables. The first few tasks incorporate some embedded review. Students make use of the structure of the tables (MP7) to organize and understand the information from descriptions of data. In the Information Gap activity, students must make sense of problems and persevere in solving them (MP1) and attend to the precision of their language (MP6) to ask appropriate questions of their peers.