STATISTICAL FACTS


1.You might think that the most common street name in the United States would be "First", but according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, the most common street name is "Second", with 10,866 occurrences. Strangely enough, "First" isn't in second place either; "Third" is in second place with 10,131 occurrences, while "First" is in third place with 9,898. 

2.The population of the Earth can be a source of many interesting statistics. In the year 8,000 B.C., there were only 5 million people on Earth. Four thousand years later, the population had only risen by 2 million people, to 7 million people. Nowadays, Earth's population rises by 2 million roughly every nine days.

3.In 1662, John Graunt, a London merchant, published the first set of actuarial tables in his book Observations on the Bills of Mortality. Graunt provides many interesting statistics regarding causes of deaths in London in 1632. Seven people are listed as being murdered, 10 people as having died from cancer, and no specific mention is made of heart ailments. On the other hand, 13 people are listed as having died from "planet", 38 from "king's evil", and 98 from "rising of the lights". Possibly the saddest statistic, however, is that out of 9,535 deaths that year, infants made up 2,268 of them, over 23%.

4.Worldwide, around 265 people are born every minute and 115 people die, for a net increase in population of 150 people every minute. 

5.The current population of Earth is over 6,970,000,000. Around 1900 there were only 1,600,000,000 people, meaning that Earth's population has more than quadrupled in slightly over 100 years' time. 

6.Only 1% of the population has a "genius" IQ, one of 140 or higher.

7.Over 88% of the world's population lives north of the Equator.

8.In 1985, NASA estimated the probability of a space shuttle accident to be 1 in 100,000. However, on the 25^th shuttle launch on January 28, 1986, Challenger exploded after take-off, killing all seven astronauts aboard; on February 1, 2003, the 113^rd mission, Columbia exploded on re-entry, again with the loss of all seven astronauts. Other groups had earlier estimated the probability of failure as being closer to 1 in 100, a probability that now seems more reasonable.

9.In a study of 3,000 people who made New Year's resolutions in 2007, only 12% stuck to them. The resolution with the greatest chance of success was "to enjoy life more".
In 1936, Literary Digest magazine polled 10 million people (more people than in any previous survey prior to a presidential election) using the telephone and its mailing list to try to predict the outcome of the United States presidential election. Their results indicated that Alf Landon would defeat Franklin Roosevelt by a margin of 370 electoral votes to 161; however, in the election, Landon was trounced by Roosevelt by a margin of 523 electoral votes to 8, at the time the largest landslide in a presidential election. The problem with the survey was that, during the Great Depression, telephones and magazine subscriptions were luxuries that not everyone could afford. Those who could afford such luxuries tended to vote Republican, but the voting public in general was more inclined to vote Democrat.

10.In 1915, statistics were compiled from 18 U.S. states of the number of deaths from three branches of outdoor sport. 16 people were killed in football, 59 in hunting, and 59 in baseball.
In 1938, a United States presidential commission concluded that the nation's population would never reach 140 million. The population exceeded that figure only eight years later.



J.Santillan