This post is basically a tribute to the sometimes undeservedly underrated branch of science known as statistics, which is all about collecting, analyzing, presenting, and interpreting data. From governmental census data to financial data and planning, business, sports and weather forecasting and much more, statistics is used in virtually every aspect of our lives.
It keeps us informed and in touch with current events by giving a unique perspective on facts and their relation with each other.
So in order to show us all how it was not worth it to skip stats class back in high school, we are diving into some of the most interesting threads on Reddit where people shared the most intriguing, random and mind-blowing statistics. Get yourself a cuppa and enjoy this entertaining bunch of random data below!
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20% OR MORE of pregnancies end in miscarriage. 20% is just "known pregnancies" and doesn't take into account all the women who just think "oh, my period was a day late, weird" without realizing they've actually had a very early miscarriage.
That is stunningly high compared to what we've been led to believe. If you think of all the women you know who either have or have tried to have children, there's an excellent chance that several of them have had a miscarriage before.
When you realize exactly how common it is, it makes it that much more sad that it is so stigmatized. If we talked about it more, maybe it wouldn't catch so many people off guard.
One million seconds is less than 11 days.
One billion seconds is more than 31 years.
The percentage of the Chinese population living in extreme poverty (living below 1.90$ a day) went from over 80% in the early 80's to 1.4% in 2014. In fact, it was still 23.1% just 10 years before that, in 2004. It's the most massive lift out of extreme poverty in world history.
Mao utterly, completely failed to lift anyone out of poverty; the success began under Deng Xiaoping.
If the oldest living person is 115 years old, then 116 years ago there was a totally different set of humans on earth.
95% of the ocean and 99% of the oceans floor remains unexplored
Only 2 percent of people truly enjoy their jobs. The rest are in it to eat. So the next time you hear some a*****e on TEDTalk tell you to follow your dreams and your passions, remember that he is probably part of that very small percentage of people who have that luxury to fail.
During the battle of the Somme in WW1, the British Army lost 20,000 men...on the first day.
Whole generations and towns were wiped out in the space of hours
4/3 of americans don't know fractions.
8% of people pronounce Wi-Fi as wiffy...8%. I don't know who you are, but I will find you...
“Wify” or “Weefee” (short “e”) is pronouced in Slovakia as well (just with one F). As many other english words we have taken over where is “i” because we pronounce it here as english pronounce “e” and not “aj” 😁 Tried my best to explain it 😀 I think also Czech and Hungarian do it as well (Poland too?) and i think many other european countries, so i think it will be more than 8%. I just realized that in english pronuciation i heard it only in America, everywhere else i just heard “wify” 😀
The average person in canada has a higher net worth than the average person in the USA. The median income for canadians is about twice the median income for americans.
This is absolutely untrue. Even a token search will show that the two counties have a similar median income. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country
Net worth and income are two different things. Worth is what you own - your debt. Americans have way too much debt.
Load More Replies...And probably less billionaires, which means a more evenly balanced distribution of wealth.
Median means the mid point of a data set with half the data points above and half below. Since there are only 53 billionaires in Canada they have virtually no impact on the median
Load More Replies...Mostly because we have no universal health plan, plain and simple. But the present system also has companies deduct health insurance costs as flat fees, meaning the employee making minimum wage is charged the same amount as the CEO making hundreds of times more. If it was charged as a percentage of one’s salary instead, the paychecks of lower wage employees would increase, and those of the CEOs would decrease. The CEO’s drop would hardly be noticed.
This is not true. For the majority of corporations, especially the ones with high earning CEOs, the employees share of health insurance is based on income tiers. The more money you make, you pay a larger percent of the cost of insurance.
Load More Replies...probably because Americans have to pay mutliple arms and legs for basic healthcare
This is because the average person in the USA is just grist for the mill.
Is it true that if someone wanted Canadian citizenship they have prove them selves to be productive members society?
I would say they are lucky not to have Brandon for a president but Trudeau is just as bad.
Nice to see these comments from time to time. Most people on here… 🤦🏻♂️🙄. “I think the government should take care of me and that makes me smart”
Load More Replies...Not true according to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country. I think it is true if you exclude US billionaires...
With a median income it won't matter if you removed billionaires. For the mean income that would be true. So, not true!
Load More Replies...Yes, but how does that shake out when you factor in the % of their income that goes to taxes? I'm not saying that's a problem, but free healthcare in Canada has to get paid for somehow. The flip side for Americans is they can pay A LOT of $$$ out of pocket for healthcare when something unexpected comes up.
Plus women with autonomy over their bodies... which we had in the US until,,, well Mitch McConnell has something to answer for when he delayed the Supm. Court appointment because there was an election within the year BUT pushed Amy Coney Barrett appointment through within weeks of the 2020 election. SHAME
There is a better way of measuring relative wealth: What is the per capita amount of "play money" left over once all the monthly costs and obligations (rent/mortgage, food, car payment, fuel/other costs of commuting to work, utilities, health care and doctor bills, tax, kid's education, etc.) are met. In this respect central Europe leads the world.
Cost of living is different in Canada. Ever notice when they list US & CN price on stuff the Canada is way higher. Also houses costs more their- at least 100k more at minimum
Canada population 38,000,000, US population 334,000,000. Different denominators.
Every single freaking day I hear about the state of America, I like Canada more and more
Do you seriously think the statisticians, who do this for a living, would make a rookie mistake like failing to convert the currencies, before comparing? By that logic, the Venezuelans win hands down since their Bolivar trades at about 514,000 to one US dollar, so their median income must be multiple hundreds of thousands that of an American's.
Load More Replies...Yes and we are taxed a lot more yet still don't go into bankruptcy because of medical bils....hmmmmm - no keep your system - seems to be working so well
We don't want to keep it. Well, the dumb Americans do, but they're dumb so what are we supposed to do with them? Really, does anyone know? That would be helpful for us.
Load More Replies...Not based on the statistics I read. U.S. median individual income for full time employees $44k, $C55k.
All of you people on here defending Trump need to stop. This is a liberal website where the standard IQ is no higher than 70. They always resort to Trump because they have nothing else to go on. I would like to have one liberal tell me one good thing that biden has done for the country or honestly tell me that your better off now than when Trump was in office. Cant be done.
Astronomer here! One that has blown my mind is statistically it is now believed that every star has extrasolar planets around it. It turns out every one near us does, at least. At the very worst case, Kepler has shown that 70% of all stars have a planet orbiting its parent star at Earth's distance or closer.
Further, per the Kepler mission data it is now believed 17% of all stars have an Earth-sized planet around it.
I mean, we knew there were a lot, but this means there's at least a trillion planets in our own Milky Way galaxy. The thought makes me giddy!
It makes me optimistic that there may be life out there, and possibly intelligent life. On the flip side, it took almost the entire life of the planet for intelligent life to appear. The earth is thought to be 4.543 billion years old. Early on, the planet was an uninhabitable ball of magma and took a while to cool and for liquid water to appear. The first life appeared 3.77 billion years ago, the first multicellular life appeared only 600 million years ago, the first dinosaurs appeared 243 and 233.23 million years ago, and the first Homo sapiens dated back to 300,000 years ago. The first civilization appeared only 4,000 to 3,000 BCE. This is relatively late as Earth can probably only support life for only another 150 mil-1.5 billion years until the sun gradually brighteners and vaporizes our planet's water depending on what models are used. If it is only 150 mil years or much less if we do it first. This means that intelligent life formed kind of at the last minute for our planet.
The leading cause of death among pregnant women in the United States is being murdered, and most often by a current or former romantic partner.
https://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20010320/number-1-cause-of-death-in-pregnant-women-murder
Around half of all trans people attempt suicide at least once
Also something like 1/3 of women with mental disabilities are sexually assaulted
Edit: so about the trans statistic this does not imply that being trans is a mental illness!! The shocking part is how awful and widespread transphobia is, and it’s consequences.
Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than to the building of the great pyramids.
Someone in the world [passes away] of starvation or malnutrition every three seconds.
If you picked a random Swede and a random Canadian, the Swede would be more likely to speak English than the Canadian.
There is a fence in Australia that stretches the equivalent distance of London to New York.
There are two long fences! One fence cuts off the south-east quarter of the country and is intended to stop dingos. It's about 5,600km, which is slightly longer than the distance from London to New York. The other fence cuts off the western part of the country and is intended to stop rabbits and other pests. It's about 3,300 km, so a fair bit shorter than the distance from London to New York. Obviously the post is referring to the dingo fence.
40% of Americans cannot afford a $400 USD emergency.
I can't deal with the fact ppl have to think about money when ill or hurt. I hate that. All I'm concerned about is getting to the hospital. They might make me wait if it's not as urgent as others but I'm gna get all the scans, meds and surgeries I need.
If the earth was the size of a basketball then the atmosphere would be about as thick as a coat of paint. The only thing that separates us from the cold, harsh, vacuum of space is this comparably tiny layer of gasses that are held in place by gravity.
Another interesting one is that the only thing preventing the Earth from becoming a barren rock not unlike Mars is the fact we still have a molten core that generates a magnetic field that shields the atmosphere from being swept away by the solar wind. When the core eventually stops spinning it's game over.
Late to the party, but:
Feral cats in Australia [take out] around 377 million birds per year.
That's more than one million birds per day.
One million. Per day.
That's why neutering and/or culling feral populations are extremely important. Lots of people don't know how destructive to the environment cats really are.
The first cities started around 12,000 years ago. The first evidence of writing started 6,000 years ago. Humanity appeared 200,000 years ago in its current form. So 94% of the time we've been on the planet happened before we had cities, and 97% before we had writing.
That sharks have been on this earth for some 450 million years. 450 Million Fucking Years!
"The wars in [the Democratic Republic of Congo] have claimed nearly the same number of lives as having a 9/11 every single day for 360 days, the genocide that struck Rwanda in 1994, the ethnic cleansing that overwhelmed Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the genocide that took place in Darfur, the number of people killed in the great tsunami that struck Asia in 2004, and the number of people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- all combined and then doubled."
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/27/opinion/congo-war-ignored-vava-tampa/
I've posted this before on a similar thread, but..
Had an Economics Professor blow my mind with this. Most people think of millions, billions and trillions relatively similarly. They are huge numbers and when talking about money not very many people really ever have to account with numbers that high to see the incredible difference between each. I think this does a great job of breaking it down.
If you made **$1/second**, you'd be really really rich. At that rate, you would make:
**$60** in 1 minute
**$3600** in 1 hour
**$86,400** in 1 day
**$1 Million ($1,000,000)** in 11.574 days
**$1 Billion ($1,000,000,000)** in 31.7 years
**$1 Trillion ($1,000,000,000,000)** in 31,709 years
For one person who makes a Million dollars every 12 days to pay off the US National Debt (21.461 Trillion according to www.usdebtclock.org), it would take over **680,506 years.**
There are more possible combinations to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on earth... and if you started shuffling a new combination every second starting at the big bang, you'd still be shuffling right now...
90% of people live in the northern hemisphere
Likely due to the estimation that 68% of the Earth’s land exists in the Northern Hemisphere, while 32% is located in the Southern Hemisphere.
It takes an individual photon several millenia to go from the center to the surface of the sun.
Then it takes only 8 minutes to reach Earth, and a couple days at most to leave the solar system.
So far, 46 people have [passed away] by lawn mowers in the U.S. this year. 46.
More [lives are taken away] by vending machines than by sharks.
More infuriating than mind-blowing, but a commonly shared “statistic” is that 80% of women who make at least 6 figures do so through direct sales marketing, aka, MLMs or pyramid schemes, like Mary Kay, Amway, and Herbalife.
The *actual* statistic is that 80% of *people* who make at least 6 figures *through MLMs* are women. There’s only about 200 of them, and they’re all at the top of their respective pyramids, but the first statistic is commonly used to try and entice new people into the company.
I go to one of the top universities in the US, and I recently found out that 45% of our student population is in the top 5%, wealth-wise. I most definitely am not, and it made a lot of sense but was incredibly disheartening at the same time.
The average number of legs, for humans, is less than 2.
But consider this - since there are always pregnant people, the average number of skeletons in a person's body is always above 2.
99% of the wild African grey parrot population had disappeared since 1992. Solely due to the illegal trapping for the pet trade.
Indian and nepalese vulture populations have declined by 99% since 2000 due to diclofenac poisoning.
Who is giving them diclofenac? Or is it some naturally occurring thing?
In the year 8000 B.C. there were 5 million humans on Earth.
Why is there a photo of a contemporary indigenous gathering to illustrate a post about "8000 bc"?
Greater Tokyo has a larger population than Canada.
And every other sane country with gun control had less mass shootings than America
The existence of the T-Rex is closer in time to today than it is to the existence of the Stegosaurus.
92% of Downs Syndrome foetus' are aborted once detected by screening (in Europe).
The population of the world has doubled since the mid 70's.
In the US if you do the following 3 things:
1. Graduate High School
2. Get and keep *any* job
3. Don't have a child out of wedlock
You have a 75% chance of being in the middle class and a *98%* chance of living above the poverty line.
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/
The battle of Stalingrad alone claimed significantly more lives than all the US servicemen killed in our nation's entire history.
The Vatican has 2.3 popes per square mile.
if jenny is walking in the vatican, and has walked 5 square miles, and there are approximately 2.3 popes per square mile, approximately how many popes has jenny trod upon?
1 in 4 people in the UK suffer from a mental health issue.
Among a random group of 23 people, theres a 50% chance two of them share the same birthday
Ants have a larger biomass than humans.
Note: this post originally had 81 images. It’s been shortened to the top 50 images based on user votes.
Had to stop reading the list because most of these stats don’t have sources cited and that’s frustrating. Am hoping some helpful Pandas will fill in the gaps with proper sources and more info (and thanks to all who do!)
I have to agree with you Emiloy. A lot of the joy and interest in reading this kind of post is diminished due to lack of sources cited!
Load More Replies...Agree and of these fact-checked? Bored Panda definitely has a history of unchecked, inaccurate “facts”...
BP never fact checks, or edits. They only protect us from the words meaning unalive. Because THAT is the true issue in life!!!
Load More Replies...The one single point in this list that should be the "moral of the story" is the one that 4/3 Americans don't know fractions. Or, in general, math. Because the number of top commenters who completely screwed up their math with their arguments against each point is astounding. #facepalm
Honestly, this post made me realise the world sucks. And it all goes back to men making decisions for women. Banning abortions, saying the so called "baby" is an actual human(mind you, it is not, even scientifically, it doesn't think or have feelings). I genuinely want to scream. Like, come on people.
Genuinely curious, at what point does it become a human to you?
Load More Replies...Had to stop reading the list because most of these stats don’t have sources cited and that’s frustrating. Am hoping some helpful Pandas will fill in the gaps with proper sources and more info (and thanks to all who do!)
I have to agree with you Emiloy. A lot of the joy and interest in reading this kind of post is diminished due to lack of sources cited!
Load More Replies...Agree and of these fact-checked? Bored Panda definitely has a history of unchecked, inaccurate “facts”...
BP never fact checks, or edits. They only protect us from the words meaning unalive. Because THAT is the true issue in life!!!
Load More Replies...The one single point in this list that should be the "moral of the story" is the one that 4/3 Americans don't know fractions. Or, in general, math. Because the number of top commenters who completely screwed up their math with their arguments against each point is astounding. #facepalm
Honestly, this post made me realise the world sucks. And it all goes back to men making decisions for women. Banning abortions, saying the so called "baby" is an actual human(mind you, it is not, even scientifically, it doesn't think or have feelings). I genuinely want to scream. Like, come on people.
Genuinely curious, at what point does it become a human to you?
Load More Replies...