When you choose the data you need for your work or studies, you need to be careful over your selection.

Are you dealing with cross-sectional or time series data?
If you've got some time series data, is it adjusted or not?
How does the time series data fluctuate?

These and other questions are investigated in this section. Here you'll also find tips on how to respond to data in exams, selecting the right information from the questions you face, in order to give effective answers. Finally, you'll find material on data-mining, how organisations and institutions select data from the huge quantities of information that have been gathered on us.

There are four main areas of this section and you can access them at any time using the navigation bar on the left. The four sections are:

• Explanation - a guide to selecting and responding to data in exams
• Illustration - illustrations of a variety of areas including customer databases and data mining techniques
• Worksheets - a worksheet on Renault / Nissan and data use in the car industry
• Review - a brief summary of the topics covered in the 'selecting' section and a final suggested activity