Quotes About Statistics

If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world's population.

more than half of all first heart attacks (fatal or otherwise) occur in people who are fit and healthy and have no known obvious risks. They don't smoke or drink to excess, are not seriously overweight, and do not have chronically high blood pressure or even bad cholesterol readings, but they get a heart attack anyway. Living a virtuous life doesn't guarantee that you will escape heart problems; it just improves your chances.

A person who smokes cigarettes regularly (about a pack a day) is fifty times more likely than a nonsmoker to get cancer. In

Cancer may be a common cause of death, but it is not a common event in life.

Today some 40 percent of us will discover we have cancer at some point in our lives. Many, many more will have it without knowing it and will die of something else first.

Remarkably, even with all the improvements in care, you are 70 percent more likely to die from heart disease today than you were in 1900. That's partly because other things used to kill people first, and partly because a hundred years ago people didn't spend five or six hours an evening in front of a television with a big spoon and a tub of ice cream. Heart disease is far and away the Western world's number one killer.

There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one.

Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons.

Interestingly, in the United States no one has died of old age since 1951, at least not officially, for in that year old age was banished as a cause from death certificates. In Britain, it is still allowed, though not much used.

In 1954, just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath.

second largest and other similar comparisons often lead writers astray: 'Japan is the second largest drugs market in the world after the United States' (The Times). Not quite. It is the largest drugs market in the world after the United States or it is the second largest drugs market in the world. The sentence above could be fixed by placing a comma after 'world'.

but it is a fact that men who have been castrated live about as long as women do.

Yet in clean Hong Kong asthma rates are 15 percent, while in heavily polluted Guangzhou they are just 3 percent, exactly the opposite of what one would expect.

About 15 percent of girls now begin puberty by age seven.

Despite its lavish spending, the United States has one of the highest rates of both infant and maternal death among industrialized nations," according to The New York Times.

one third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.

On the last Sunday of March 1851, the Church of England conducted a national survey to see how many people actually attended church that day. The results were a shock. More than half the people of England and Wales had not gone to church at all, and only 20 percent had gone to an Anglican service.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent

In consequence, some 50 percent of people globally are estimated to be vitamin D deficient for at least part of the year. In northern climes, it may be as much as 90 percent.

When more than one teenager is in a car, for instance, the risk of an accident multiplies by 400 percent.

In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London. Only the steady influx of ambitious provincials and Protestant refugees from the Continent kept the population growing—and grow it did, from fifty thousand in 1500 to four times that number by century's end.

As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.

A person's lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5 percent, and eating processed meat every day appears to boost a person's absolute risk of cancer by 1 percentage point, to 6 percent (that's 18 percent of the 5 percent lifetime risk).

If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world's population.