If you read Bored Panda, you know we like data. If we're doing a story on a woman banning her mother-in-law from her house, we look at what experts have to say on family relationships. If we're writing about employees quitting on a demanding boss, we present surveys on worker needs.
Numbers help us humans to contextualize individual examples and show us how common or rare, loved or hated something is in a broader sense.
Interested in the big picture, they give us the big picture, Reddit user Awesomeguy256 posted a question to the platform, asking its users "What is the most interesting statistic?" Since then, people have left over 14,000 comments under it, many of which share fascinating information on everything from economics to the animal kingdom. Here are some of the best ones.
This post may include affiliate links.
More Vietnam vets [took their own lives] than [passed away] in the war.
The solution is to make the people who want to start a war do it themselves.
A black man in St. Louis is more likely to be killed by a police officer than the average US citizen is to get murdered at all.
Whether you think BLM is a bunch of horse s**t or not, Republican or Democrat, or whatever, this stat is pretty interesting. Mind you, a subset of the US population probably doesn't even believe that statistic is true.
80% of Orange Tabby cats are male.
Wearing a seatbelt correctly reduces chance of front seat passenger fatality due to front end collision by 45%. Seat belts save lives. For f***s sake people, wear them. Also airbags are more likely to cause injuries rather than prevent them when seat belts are not worn.
Hold up your hands and clap them together.
Wait one second, then do it again.
If you could plot the distance between the first clap and the second clap, it would be more than 800 kilometers.
This is because the Earth is moving around the sun, the sun is moving around the center of the galaxy, the galaxy is moving through the Virgo Supercluster, and the Virgo Supercluster is barreling through the universe. When you add up all the velocities and compare the result to the cosmic microwave background (which is the closest thing we have to a universal frame of reference), it comes out to about 800 kilometers per second.
In the time it took you to read this, you've traveled farther than you'll ever walk in your life.
Statistically speaking the average person is a 30 year old Chinese man.
Also, statistically speaking, his name would be "Mohammed Lee". ('Mohammed' is the most common first name, and "Lee' is the most common family (last) name.)
The tallest giraffe ever measured (George) was 19 feet (5.8m) tall.
The longest crocodile ever measured (Lolong) was 20.25 feet (6.17m) long
So take the tallest giraffe you've ever seen, and then add a little, and you've got the biggest crocodile ever measured reliably with a tape measure down its back.
Herpetologists agree that sightings of crocodiles up to 23 feet are not unreasonable, but they're very hard to capture when they're that big. Therefore, no absolutely reliable numbers.
Sharks are older than trees. Sharks are at least 400 million years old, trees are sitting at 350 million years.
Edit: Also another fun fact, sharks are so successful when it comes to evolution and long term survival because of a trait called "Adaptive Radiation", which is a huge increase of species diversity in a short period of time. Modern sharks stem from an adaptive radiation that happened during the Jurassic Period about 200 million years ago. One of the newest modern sharks is the hammerhead, coming in at around 50 million years.
holy c**p. i has no idea they were THAT old. and yet, now they’re endangered due to our stupid overfishing. beings that have lived that long, now at risk of going extinct. it’s just sad.
That by almost all important measures, the world is a better place to live today than at any other time in human history.
The richest 1% dudes in the world have more wealth than the rest of the planet.
The world's 8 richest men have as much money as the poorest half, 3,6 billions people.
The average cumulus cloud weighs more than the Statue of Liberty.
I've seen this one before and it still amazes me. I guess I never thought of a cloud having any weight at all. HHmmmmm
Britain had more planes at the end of the Battle of Britain than at the beginning, because they were being made at such an incredible rate that it surpassed the losses.
If you're in a group of twenty-three people, there's a 50% chance that two of them share a birthday.
If you're in a group of seventy people, that probability jumps to over 99%.
My uncle, great-uncle and I all share a birthday. I wonder what the stats are for family members having the same birthday are...
3-4 billion people on this planet earn $2.50 or less per day.
I found out at a conference last week that 5 billion people don't have access to safe surgery.
It really shocked me. That's 5 out of every 7 people in the world.
That is so sad, if every person was a day, the people that have access to it would only be weekends, sorry for the weird analogy, that was just how my ADHD brain processed it
25% of California’s air pollution is from China.
wait, that’s actually really interesting. i want to know more about how it’s able to travel that far and still be potent. also a little bit saddening, seeing as how widespread pollution can get
Til the world record for children born to one woman is 69. She had 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets.
America has about 5% of the worlds population but about 25% of the worlds criminals.
South America is moving away from Africa at about the same speed your fingernails grow.
Omg imperial systen is using nail growth as a kind of measurment now??
It would take 1.2 million mosquitoes, each sucking once, to completely drain the average human of blood.
If all the humans alive right now lived in the same density per square mile as New York City, we could all live in the state of Texas.
Over 1 million earths could fit into the sun.
Size-wise, a particle of dust is halfway between a subatomic particle and the Earth.
86% of British people live within 8 miles from where they were born.
Fat leaves our body 86% through the breath. The other 14% leaves our body through water.
It takes roughly 170,000 years for photons from the Sun's core to reach the convection zone of the photosphere where it is released out into space. In other words, the Sun light you see is hundreds of thousands of years old.
The population of Ireland has not yet recovered half-way from the famine of 150 years ago.
The immediate effects of the famine saw a great many people [perished] from starvation or disease and others emigrate to avoid the same fate. The longer term effects created a breakdown in the social order which forced emigration and a consequent 100 year decline in the population. It's only in the last 50 years that the population has started to grow again.
If you and your spouse both have a divorce under your belt , and one (or both) of you have MORE than one divorce under your belt, the failure rate of your marriage is 93%.
85% of all Americans live within 20 minutes of a Walmart.
There are more trees on planet Earth than there are stars in our galaxy.
Considering another fact "there are more star in the universe than the sand grain on beach" i'am not believing this one
80 per cent of 80 year old males or older will have suffered or will face prostate cancer at some point in his life.
Eighty. Percent.
Yes, and it is similar for breast cancer. However, there are many very slow growing types of cancer. Most of these people die of old age, not cancer. Misleading.
25% of the earths crust is actually made of iron like in your cereal.
If you correctly shuffle a deck of cards, you'll create a configuration that has never existed, and likely never will again. This is because there are 8.1x10^67 possible arrangements for fifty-two cards, and getting through each of them would take longer than the lifespan of the universe.
1) The biggest air force in the world is the United States Air Force. The second biggest is the United States Navy and Army combined.
2) It is generally accepted that the Air craft carrier is the most valuable and influential piece of war machinery because it allows you to wage a war from anywhere without putting civilians at risk.
As of 2016 the USA had 14 the next closest country had 2.
Aircraft carriers are also the most valuable asset for fast emergency aid after natural disasters - they contain a full hospital, water cleaning facilities and amphibian landing crafts + pioneering machinery to clear airports for heavier cargo planes like C-130, C-160 or C-17 full of supplies
There are more barrels of bourbon in Kentucky than people.
50% of our living US presidents have been accused of sexual harassment.
There are more employees at Walt Disney World (approx. 75,000) than coal miners in the United States (approx. 50,000).
Morbidly obese people cost their insurers significantly less than do fit people. The reason being that even though morbid obesity causes such a multitude of health problems, people die at such a relatively young age that they don’t have the chance to run up such a high tab.
Hmmm. . . . I wonder if that's why some insurance companies won't cover weight loss surgery
For a while, we were all a single cell. Now we have about 37 trillion of them.
Humans are so much easier to get along with when they only have one cell...
If none of Wayne Gretzky's goals counted, his assists would still make him the all-time leading scorer in the NHL.
In 110 years let’s say, every single person who is alive now will be dead. All of the big superstars and actors and whoever will be completely different people we don’t know. I was stoned out of my mind last night and I was thinking about that and it absolutely blew my f’ing mind.
“i was stoned out of my mind” ah, the higher plane of shower thoughts
My History lecturer told us the other day that more US Soldiers [unalived] in the Civil war than US Soldiers have [unalived] in all other wars ever, combined.
If you're a man over 7 feet tall, there's a 17% chance you'll be in the NBA.
That's roughly 1 in 6.
52% of white women voted Trump over Hillary.
Black men have a 1/3 chance of being incarcerated at some point in their life time in the US
You know something is bad when it is 50% more likely for black people to be innocent, and there are still people who say that Black Lives Matter is dumb and unneeded
The average person has one ovary, one testicle, less than 2 arms.
Most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average.
There are more planes in the oceans than there are submarines in the sky.
More planes were shot down during World War II than there are registered aircraft in the world today.
The mass of all viruses in the ocean easily surpasses the mass of all living Elephants.
Women on OKCupid only consider the top 7% of men to be above average in attractiveness, based on their pictures alone. They consider only the top 19% to be average or better. The biggest group in the stats was "moderately unattractive" with 31%. "Unattractive" starts at the 58% percentile, with 27% of men being "very unattractive."
Women recorded no men as "very attractive."
More Americans than Canadians live north of Canada's southernmost point.
Canadians are americans too, you know? I'm chilean and i'm american too
Cosmetic surgery - South Korea:
South Korean women, the most obsessed with cosmetic surgery, are among the world's women. Statistics show that one out of five women in South Korea has at least one cosmetic surgery, four times higher than women in the United States. As a result, South Korea's cosmetic surgeons have gained a reputation for driving around 7.5 million people to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, for cosmetic surgery.
One of the most dangerous occupations in the United States is President.
18% of Presidents have died while in office, half of those by assassination.
1. Logging workers Fatal injury rate: 111 per 100,000 workers Total deaths (2018): 56 Salary: $41,230 Most common fatal accidents: Contact with objects and equipment The most dangerous job in America is logging. Logging workers had a fatal accident rate that was 33 times the average job nationwide. Logging workers harvest forests to provide the raw material for goods such as wood, paper, and cardboard, in addition to other industrial products. These workers spend almost all of their time outside in forests and other isolated areas.
Despite making up a little less than 2% of the population, 44% of the billionaires in the US are Jewish.
The reason for this is, VERY simply put, that Jewish people were excluded from (mostly Christian) society in many European countries (long before WWII) in that they weren't allowed to do lots of professions. Jobs related to money (banking) were allowed though as Christians didn't want to do them. So these were the obvious choice for many Jews. Please keep this in mind next time someone uses the hideous "greedy / money obsessed Jew" stereotype.
There are more people living in Dallas/Fort Worth than the entire state of Louisiana.
IQ correlates more strongly with income than socioeconomic background.
I read somewhere (yeah, that sounds reliable, I know) that poverty can make your IQ drop by several points. Probably because constant fear and anxiety kind of occupy your mind enough.
New Jersey hasn’t had a male Lt. Governor since 1757.
Mostly because between independence and 2001 they didn't *have* a Lt Governor.
If you were to take the smallest cylinder of air completely surrounding the Eiffel Tower, the air itself would have more mass than the rest of the Tower.
Edit: Due to buoyant forces, it wouldn't exactly weigh more on Earth. However, it still has more mass. Also clarified the size of the cylinder.
This is a bit technical, but let's say a test is given to detect HIV in a sample where 1% of the population has HIV. Let's say that 90% of those that got a positive result actually had HIV and 90% of those that got a negative result didn't have it. The cool part is that, with these statistics, if you took the test and were given a positive result, you would only have an 8.33% chance of actually having HIV! I'd explain the math but this is already long enough. This probably isn't that interesting to most but learning this in statistics blew my mind.
The coolest part with statistics is that you can use them without any relationship with reality. If you have a positive test to HIV, you most probably have HIV. Those tests have become pretty reliable.
Can we pretty please include a link that supports that "fact"? Stuff like women talk more than man is BS: "A review of 56 studies conducted by linguistics researcher Deborah James and social psychologist Janice Drakich found only two studies showing that women talked more than men, while 34 studies found men talked more than women.[6] Sixteen of the studies found they talked the same and four showed no clear pattern." https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/marriage-equals/201910/do-women-really-talk-more-men
These are just Reddit posts. So take it with a grain of salt but it isn't BP's job to fact check them.
Load More Replies...
This article had so many false posts. It actually bothers me even if it's for entertainment that posting falsehoods is such a flippant thing.
Huh, and here I was going around telling people it was 47.8%. Don't I just feel foolish now 😳
Load More Replies...
Can we pretty please include a link that supports that "fact"? Stuff like women talk more than man is BS: "A review of 56 studies conducted by linguistics researcher Deborah James and social psychologist Janice Drakich found only two studies showing that women talked more than men, while 34 studies found men talked more than women.[6] Sixteen of the studies found they talked the same and four showed no clear pattern." https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/marriage-equals/201910/do-women-really-talk-more-men
These are just Reddit posts. So take it with a grain of salt but it isn't BP's job to fact check them.
Load More Replies... This article had so many false posts. It actually bothers me even if it's for entertainment that posting falsehoods is such a flippant thing.
Huh, and here I was going around telling people it was 47.8%. Don't I just feel foolish now 😳
Load More Replies...
