Let's say we have two samples, normally distributed, with a significance level of 0.05 (our α) and our test statistic (the t value) comes out to be 2.34 with 4 degrees of freedom. We would look at the table to find the degrees of freedom and find where our test statistic value falls in with respect to the p values. In this case, our t falls between 2.132 and 2.776.