Quotes About Statistics

94 per cent of us think we do above-average work.

Though the majority of lung cancer is attributed to smoking, approximately a quarter of all cases occur in people who've never smoked.21 Although some of these cases are due to secondhand smoke, another contributing cause may be another potentially carcinogenic plume: fumes from frying.

The population with the highest rate of the "Alzheimer's gene" has one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer's disease? This contradiction may be explained by Nigerians' extremely low blood-cholesterol levels, thanks to a diet low in animal fat104 and consisting mainly of grains and vegetables.105 So, it

Was the weight loss simply statistically significant or actually significant? That's for you to decide. During the three-month trial, compared to the placebo group, the group taking one daily tablespoon of vinegar steadily lost about a pound a month and the group taking two daily tablespoons were down a total of about five pounds. Five pounds may not sound like a lot, but that weight loss was achieved for just pennies a day without removing anything from their diets.

The CDC estimates that more than twenty-nine million Americans are living with diagnosed or undiagnosed diabetes—that's about 9 percent of the U.S. population.

For some cancers, like our number-two cancer killer, colon cancer, up to 71 percent of cases appear to be preventable through a similar portfolio of simple diet and lifestyle changes.52

Men in the United States appear to have eleven times more colorectal cancer than men in India, twenty-three times more prostate cancer, fourteen times more melanoma, nine times more kidney cancer, and seven times more lung and bladder cancer.

This may help explain why sugary drinks have been blamed as perhaps the single largest driver of the obesity epidemic,4856 accounting for at least one-fifth of the weight gained between 1977 and 2007 in the United States.4857 By the year 2000, Americans were drinking an estimated 190 calories a day of sweetened beverages.4858

The women whose mushroom consumption averaged just about one-half a mushroom or more per day had 64 percent lower odds of breast cancer compared with women who didn't eat mushrooms at all. Eating mushrooms and sipping at least half a tea bag's worth of green tea each day was associated with nearly 90 percent lower breast cancer odds.150

Are Americans living longer now compared to about a generation ago? Yes, technically. But are those extra years necessarily healthy ones? No. And it's worse than that: We're actually living fewer healthy years now than we once did. 20

The Mayo Clinic estimates that nearly 70 percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug.

Gasol walked away with 18 rebounds, exactly half of them offensive. That was more than the combined total of Garnett, Wallace, and Baby Davis.

Statistics don't appeal to our need to understand cause and effect, which is why they are so frequently ignored or misinterpreted. Stories, on the other hand, are a rich means to communicate precisely because they emphasize cause and effect.

The key to statistical prediction is to figure out how much weight you should assign to the base rate and specific case. If the expected accuracy of the prediction is low, you should place most of the weight on the base rate. If the expected accuracy is high, you can rely more on the specific case.

Further, the size of the sample you take and the length of time over which you measure are essential elements of making a prediction. And of course, you have to be using valid data. So it's important to balance the statistics and the context.

Appearance of "incentivize" or "incentivise" in major newspapers67 1980s 48 1990s 449 2000s 6159 2010–11 5885

Back then the population was 83% white; today the exact opposite is true.

the English colonies in North America accounted for only a tiny fraction of the hideous traffic in human beings. David Brion Davis, in his magisterial 2006 history Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, concludes that colonial North America 'surprisingly received only 5 to 6 percent of the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic.' Hugh Thomas in The Slave Trade calculates the percentage as slightly lower, at 4.4 percent.

On average, we consume 71 pounds of caloric sweeteners each year. That's 22 teaspoons of sugar, per person, per day.

cheese and pizza contributed more than 14 percent of the saturated fat being consumed.

One kills so many people, these days, that it's hard to keep track.

From 1968 to 2001, US per capita incomes doubled. During that same time, the average church member's giving fell from 3.10 percent to 2.66 percent of their total income.

According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, in 2006, one out of six people or 43.1 million Americans suffered foot ailments. Among cultures that don't wear shoes, approximately 2 percent of the population has foot-related injuries, compared to 70 percent among shoe-wearing societies.

Against Benioff's suggestion that San Francisco's homeless population is heavily comprised of families with children, the research finds that far more homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area are adults without families than in other parts of the United States. Whereas families make up 32, 53, and 65 percent of the homeless in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, they make up just 9 percent of the Bay Area's homeless population.