Ordinal variable example

Here is a question asking about type of variable (or scale of measurment, same thing)

One of the questions in the survey  is as follows: When did you first start reading the WSJ? High school, college, early career, mid-career, late career, or retirement?

There is an order here: you go to high school, then college and so on. So we know that the variable is at the least ordinal. But is it interval? For it to be interval there would have to be some sort of consistent set of units in the intervals. Here we don't have that. We could describe high school as 1, college as 2 and so on.....but could not do any arithmetic operations on them.

So this variable is ordinal and so is categorical.