Unemployment Rate

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Keyboard Cat at work. ¡Happy Thanksgiving! Stay tuned for our last pre-Thanksgiving infographic tomorrow!

¿What is the current U.S. unemployment rate?

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1. How close did you get to the right answer?

2. How close did America, as a whole, get to the right answer?

3. Why do you think Americans were so wrong about the answer?

4. What do you think about the actual answer? Not bad, eh?*

5. What is one consequence of Americans being totally wrong about the unemployment rate?

6. What are some other things that you think Americans get WAY wrong?

7. What does this chart tell us about the US of A?

8. What questions do you have about all this perception and reality thing?

*As of November 1, 2015 the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.0%

By the way, when Americans guess that the unemployment rate is 32% that's equivalent to guessing that the height of the average American male is about 35 feet tall.

Action Extension

Ask 10 people to identify the current US unemployment rate, then make a chart comparing the actual rate to the perceived rate from your survey, and post it in a hallway at your school.

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