Made-up statistics (part 2)

A week is made up of seven days. A circle has 360 degrees. The Earth has one natural satellite known as the Moon. Those are all undeniably factual statistics.

However, not all statistics are factual. Some of them are made up! This week the Charles Fudgemuffin blog features just some of those made-up statistics, starting with a statistic about statistics.

For copyright reasons, here's a picture of
Slowy the Hedgehog instead.

1) Apparently, 82% of all statistics are made up.

But the other 30% are true!





2) 80% of pet hedgehogs are named Sonic.

In all seriousness, I can see there being a grain of truth in this made-up statistic, especially back in the 90s.





3) A recent survey discovered that out of 1,493,739,625 people, 96% are too lazy to actually read that number.

A chocolate clock to help you count the minutes.
Or you could eat it. You decide.

4) 95% of Windows upgrades result in worse usability (at least initially).*

* This pretty much applies to most operating systems.





5) Someone told me that every piece of chocolate you eat takes away two minutes off your life.

I did the math(s) and apparently I died back in 1786.





6) According to a recent survey, 99.5% of people love responding to surveys!

Only 0.5% of people said they toss them in the bin.

Editor's note: "Something tells me that the 0.5% were lying."
Charles: "So you mean that all people love responding to surveys?"
Editor: "No, I mean if they tossed them in the bin, then they wouldn't have been included in the survey!"





7) "94% of being married is trying to find something in the kitchen that your husband has put away in the wrong place."

Credit: @EricaMorecambe

A random cross-section of the UK population.

I'm sure her husband would argue that he put it away in the right place, and that his wife is just looking in the wrong place.

Editor: "How sure are you?"
Charles: "74.2% sure."





8) The current Chelsea squad makes up approximately 6% of the UK population.





9) Apparently, 75% of people don't understand percentages.

I'm glad I'm in the other 50%!

10) Finally, here's a story where the story is real, but I can't remember the actual statistics involved, so - in keeping with the theme of this week's blog post - I've just used made-up statistics. As you'll see, the statistics aren't important, though.

This is vaguely what teletext used to look like.
Except I've made the text bigger for ease of reading.

Anyway, I remember reading a survey published on Teletext* many years ago, that asked readers if they were looking forward to a new video game that was about to be released.

* For the benefit of younger readers, Teletext was kind of like an extremely basic internet that you could only get through your TV.

The final results were something like:

Looking forward to it = 78%

Not looking forward to it = 20%
No strong opinion = 2%

And the crazy thing was, this was a telephone survey! You had to call a number to vote for your preference in the survey. And yet apparently some people read this survey and thought to themselves, "Oh, I have no strong opinion on that. I think I'll call the number to tell them that I have no strong opinion."

Why would you call a telephone survey if you had no strong opinion!? It makes no sense. Surely if you had no strong opinion, you would just not bother calling the survey at all!

Editor's note: "I wouldn't call a telephone survey even if I did have a strong opinion."
Charles: "Fair enough, but that just emphasizes my point. I also wouldn't call a telephone survey if I had a strong opinion, so I certainly wouldn't call them if I didn't have a strong opinion!"

You can find more made-up statistics by looking up the official government figures for inflation. Alternatively, you can check out my previous blog post below:
Made-up statistics (part 1)