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.
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.
90% of Native Americans were wiped out due to diesease
Due to disease........much of which was intentionally introduced into their population. Such as "donating" thousands of blankets that were previously exposed to smallpox to tribes. Or the excruciating conditions of forced migration along the trail of tears.
That is not true. There is one instance where a British officer gave a few such "infected" blankets to a tribal nation. Their ploy was unsuccessful because smallpox is almost exclusively transmitted by respiratory micro-droplets. The US government actually tried inoculating American Indians with cow pox in 1832 to help them. Of the 90% who died from disease, over 99+% were inadvertently infected.
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Yeah, I had to go back. Technically correct, tho'.
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At least some of which were intentionally spread, some accidentally ans some spread way quicker by the living conditions imposed upon them
I had heard that the native Americans were given blankets with smallpox on them. D*ck move.
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Yep, and some part were deliberately infected. Let's call it like it is: biological warfare. Many modern Americans (*cough*republicans*cough*) would prefer to white wash our history because it makes them uncomfortable. These are the things they are deliberately trying to censor.
And many people like to make false or exaggerated claims about how very evil America is. There is no evidence whatsoever that the US deliberately infected American Indians with disease. My wife is half American Indian and a doctor, and says that the stories are false.
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I smell whitewashing of history here. The word you are looking for is "genocide."
So if I have the flu and you catch it from me and die then I am a murderer? THe native population died from diseases for which they had no immunity, and no diseases were purposely introduced.
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They weren't wiped out by disease. That implies it was a natural process. They were wiped out via biological warfare.
It was a natural process. American Indians lacked immunity to the Old World diseases. If the Aztecs had "discovered" Europe and returned, the result would have been the same.
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also Andrew Jackson and his trail of tears... never forget the American Hitler
awful.i truly hate what white settler and pilgrims did to native Americans! they massacred them, forced them into reservations, and gave them diseased blankets.and they call native Americans "savages".being half Native American myself I hate the fact that some of those things could have and probably did happen to my ancestors.
My wife is half American Indian, and she said that there is no basis to the stories that the US government deliberately infected the tribal nations.
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Go take a nice handful of diphenhydramine and play slowly as possible in very heavy traffic, katie tronsden. You are an absolute shitpile rotten garbage assholecurse tragic accident bitchfungus lowlife toxic cuntvirus vile unnatural disaster fucktard, as is anyone else in your twisted mindset. Drink bleach while you're at it, and jump into a heap of Gympie nettles.
Same with Australian Aboriginals. I have vivid memories of a documentary I watched as a child, which graphically described entire populations wiped out by foreign diseases, and how some of the victims who were in the last stages of a particularly horrible sickness (I think it was smallpox) would wander off down to the seashore and lie down to die among the dunes. It was so horrible (and that's not even getting into the others who were slaughtered outright by my douchebag colonial ancestors. 😞 )
They died due to Europeans. They were fine until Europeans arrived
Same with Hawaiians😢 Our numbers were not as high, but there used to be more of us…
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
In the field of psychology, women outnumber men 2:1. Not mind-blowing, but kinda interesting
1/4 children in the United States are overweight
6.5 out of 10 black kids grow up in a single parent home. For you non stats people, you can read that as 13 out of 20 kids.
This stat only applies to US.
[Support for interracial marriage became the majority shortly after **1995.**](https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx)
[Among Republicans, 28% still oppose interracial marriage as of March 2018 (pg 92), the worst demographic for this statistic by a margin of 8%](https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/y3tke5cxwy/econTabReport.pdf)
Overall, 17% still oppose interracial marriage.
Likewise, 68% of Republicans oppose gay relationships (not marriage); the second worst demographic being people over the age of 65, at 55%.
Overall, 43% of americans still oppose same-sex relationships.
If the whole of existence since the Big Bang were collapsed into [one year](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar#/media/File%3ACosmic_Calendar.png), modern humans developed at 8 minutes to midnight and Columbus landed in the New World 1.2 seconds before midnight. Kind of puts it all in perspective.
8% of Mongolians are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.
Worldwide, .5% of the population, or 1 in 200, are direct descendants.
Edited: My mistake, 0.5% not .05%.
Maybe; maybe not! Sometimes 'facts' are repeated too much that they become true. I'm not a geneticist but if my history is right Genghis Khan gained prominence by banding clans from a general area. So, maybe these guys had the Y-chromosome from an even earlier descendant (who's not as famous).
In 1988, 8 of the 10 largest companies (by market cap) were Japanese and the largest company in Japan was bigger than the 6 biggest US companies combined.
Statistically, the biggest beneficiary of Affirmative Action college admissions policies have been White women, not minorities, because gender discrimination is included in the policy.
And yet some complains about how they lost their spot to the person of colour with the scholarship scheme over affirmative action
"Stanley and Brodsky estimated that as many as 75% of patients with borderline personality disorder make at least one nonlethal suicide attempt, and even higher percentages of patients, especially of hospitalized patients, engage in self-injurious behavior."
The [take out] radius of a neutron star quake. Keep in mind that the richter scale is log based and a neutron star quake has been recorded as high as an equivalent 34 and would cause mass extinction to a radius of 10 light years. The distance from the earth to the sun is one AU. The distance from earth to pluto is about 40 AU. Earth to the farthest object in our solar system (the edges of the oort cloud at 120,000 AU) is roughly 1.87 lightyears. A neutron star quake would exterminate all life in all directions a little over 5 times the entire distance of our solar system. This all from a neutron star’s surface adjusting by a few micrometers in less than .000001 of a second. The earthquake that leveled San Fran and [took away] thousands of people in the early 20th century was a 7.4. Cool, now imagine a quake with destructive energy about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stronger.
The distance from the bottom of the Marinara Trench to the top of Mt. Everest is only 12.31 miles.
There are more State Farm agencies than McDonalds in the US. Learned that when I started working for them.
465 acid attacks in London in 2017
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/26/europe/london-acid-attacks-2017-intl/index.html
Not heard about it for a while, not sure if there was some weird trend, or if "acid control" is a thing.
Half of the people in human history who lived to age 65 are alive today.
Klay Thompson scored 60 points in an NBA game while only dribbling the basketball 11 times.. Or Wilt Chamberlin averaging 48.5 minutes per game for an ENTIRE NBA season.. NBA games are only 48 minutes long. That means he had to play every minute of every game plus whatever games went into overtime. Bamboozling.
Michael Jordan used to DOUBLE dribble more than 11 times in a game.
15% of Google searches every day have never been searched before, this has trended the last 15 years source
If Wayne Gretzky never scored a single goal, he would still be the NHL’s all time point leader.
You have a better chance at winning the Powerball jackpot than dying of a shark attack.
California's water distribution system loses 228 billion gallons annually, enough water to supply Los Angeles for a year. The state is experiencing severe drought.
if the water is evaped, doesn't it go up and then come down (perhaps not in CA, but the water isn't "lost" just lost to our dry, dry state.
Over 800 people die from being strangled by their bedsheets.
It looks like it's 800 people per year, mainly made up of infants, the elderly and the disabled https://www.quora.com/How-do-800-people-a-year-die-from-being-tangled-in-bedsheets
Only 35% of people in the UK know what to do to save an unconscious person's life.
Source: St John's Ambulance in the UK
Children should be taught basic 1st aid and CPR in school ( it's St John , no s Ambulance)
The Willis Tower in Chicago has 104 elevators.
The Earths mass is only made up by 0.006% water.
And being the intelligent animals that we are, we have poluted our drinkable water (and the non-drinkable as well) and continue to do so.
CPR is only effective 5-8% of the time without immediate defibrillation. So if your heart stops and there isn't an AED within about 3-5 mins of you you're probably going to [pass away].
Does NOBODY know what a defibrillator actually does?! It doesn't restart the heart, it fixes irregular heartbeats.
Since 1874, there have been 10 recorded [shark attacks in Canada.](http://www.sharkattackdata.com/place/canada)
It takes more energy to brute force a bitcoin private key using a perfectly efficient system, than exists in the universe.
That Scott Steiner had a 66 and 2/3rds chance at beating Samoa Joe and Kurt angle at TNA Sacrifice.
African-American males make up ~6% of the population in the US yet commit ~50% of the homicides. We are completely unwilling to address uncomfortable facts honestly. Racism exists but is insufficient to explain the troubling statistics in the black community. Blaming all the issues facing African-Americans on racism and oppression is counterproductive and will lead to more needless black deaths.
http://www.factsareracist.com
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/08/10/african-american-homicide-rate-nearly-quadruple-national-average-11680
No, African Americans are CONVICTED of 50% of homicides. That does not mean they COMMIT 50% of homicides but you don't want to hear that do you?
Guns save more lives than they take, and the United States doesn’t have the highest *rate* of mass shootings... Norway does.
And here we have the perfect example is how statistics can be manipulated to serve most any purpose. This stupid and misleading “fact” dates back to the 2011 mass shooting in Norway. No one is buying your pro-gun b******t.
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!
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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!!!
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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?
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