While teaching students, you may find it helpful to locate “fun facts” to call out data that illustrate the topic at hand. (This blog poster had fun reading with her youngest son, who’d point out these facts and read them aloud, starting with the phrase “Fun fact…”) FRED is the perfect tool for highlighting economic facts because it has so many different categories of economic data. For instance, let’s look at transportation. Fun fact: The number of vehicle miles traveled relative to the population old enough to drive has been declining for a decade.

How this graph was created: This FRED graph requires a simple transformation. Find “Vehicle Miles Traveled,” add population to that line, and divide the first series by the second. There are several choices for population: Here we use the “Civilian Noninstitutional Population,” which includes everyone above age 16 who is not in the military or institutionalized.

Suggested by Katrina Stierholz