Everyday life. The numeracy tasks that occur in everyday situations are often management tasks that one faces in personal and family life. Others revolve around hobbies, personal development, and interests. Representative tasks are handling money and budgets, comparison shopping, personal time management, making decisions involving travel, planning holidays, mathematics involved in hobbies like quilting or wood-working, playing games of chance, understanding sports scoring and statistics, reading maps, and using measurements in home situations such as cooking or home repairs.

Work-related. At work, one is confronted with quantitative situations that often are more specialized than those seen in everyday life. In this context, people may develop good skills in managing situations that might be narrower in their application of mathematical themes. Representative tasks are completing purchase orders, totaling receipts, calculating change, managing schedules, budgets, and project resources, using spreadsheets, organizing and packing different shaped goods, completing and interpreting control charts, making and recording measurements, reading blueprints, tracking expenditures, predicting costs, and applying formulas.

Societal or community. Adults need to know about trends and processes happening in the world around them (e.g., regarding crime, health issues, wages, pollution) and may have to take part in social events or community action. This requires that adults can read and interpret quantitative information presented in the media, including statistical messages and graphs. Also, they may have to manage situations like organizing a fund-raiser, realizing the fiscal effect of community programs, or interpreting the results of a study of the latest health fad.

Further learning. It is often also important to have numeracy skills that enable a person to participate in further study, whether for academic purposes or as part of vocational training. In either case, it is important to be able to know some of the more formal aspects of mathematics that involve symbols, rules, and formulas and to understand some of the conventions used to apply mathematical rules and principles.

3.2 Facet 2: Responses

In different types of real-life situations, people may have to respond in one or more of the following ways (the first virtually always occurs; others will depend on the interaction between situational demands and the goals, skills, dispositions, and prior learning of the person):

Identify or locate some mathematical information present in the task or situation confronting them that is relevant to their purpose or goal.

Act upon or react to the information in the situation. Bishop (1988), for example, proposed that there are six modes of mathematical actions that are common in all cultures: counting, locating, measuring, designing, playing and explaining. Other types of actions or reactions may occur, such as doing some calculations ("in the head" or with a calculator), ordering or sorting, estimating or modeling (such as by using or developing a formula).

Interpret the information embedded within the situation (and the results of any prior action) and comprehend what it means or implies. This can include making a judgment about how mathematical information or known facts actually apply to the situation or context. Contextual judgment may have to be used in deciding whether an answer makes sense or not in the given context, for example, that a result of "2.35 cars" is not a valid solution to how many cars are needed to transport a group. It can also incorporate a critical aspect, where a person questions the purpose of the task, the validity of the data or information presented, and the meaning and implications of the results, both for them as an individual and possibly for the wider community.