It may be difficult to tell whether the information you are reading is correct if you are not familiar with the subject area. Here are some things to look for:

• Details of the author or the organisation. Some organisations such as Greenpeace will have their own point of view on political, economic or moral issues. Therefore, they may only give facts or statistics that support their point of view.
• Are the sources of the facts given? Do the statistics come from reliable sources such as the National Statistics web site?
• Does the information have a particular bias? Does it promote the ideas of a particular group - religious, political, etc? Emotive or vague language often indicates only opinion, propaganda or marketing attempts rather than researched facts.
• With web documents, look at the domain in the URL. This tells you whether the organisation is a college or university (.ac.), a government body (.gov), or commercial (.com). Government, university, or professional organisations may be more objective than a business wanting to sell products.