Language is frequently discussed as barrier to mathematics word problems. Hence this paper presents the initial findings of a linguistic analysis of numeracy skills test sample items. The theoretical perspective of multi-modal text analysis underpinned this study, in which data was extracted from the ten sample numeracy test items released by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) in 2015. The initial data presented here maps the core content of these items to the Australian Curriculum and identifies the lexical density of each sample item. The findings indicate that the sample test items typically correlate to Year 6 of the national curriculum but each have high lexical density.