Hey, does anyone know any good misleading statistics?

Question

Well, ya, I'm having trouble coming up with one

Answer 1

37.2% percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

75.9% percent of people mistrust statistics and think they are misleading, the other 42.4% trust them without question.

I once heard a statistic that the rate of teenage pregnancy in a conservative religious group was higher than the national average. This seemed surprising until it became apparent that the reason wasn't a high percentage of unwed mothers - it was a high percentage of women got married while still in their teens.

I recall hearing apparently conflicting claims about employment during a presidential election campaign a number of years ago. The challenger claimed that unemployment was up during the President's term in office. The President's campaigners said that employment was up! It turns out that both were true. The population had increased, and it turned out the number of people who were employed and the number of people who were unemployed had both increased.

When someone wants to use statistics to make a point, there are many choices of just what numbers to use. Suppose we want to dramatize how much the price of candy bars has gone up. We might have the following data:

January $ .76
February $ .54
March $ .51
April $ .63
May $ .80
June $ .91
July $ .76

We could correctly say that the price jumped from 51 cents to 91 cents in only three months (March to June), an increase of more than 78%! On the other hand, we can see it didn't change at all from January to July, which we might avoid mentioning if we wanted to impress people with the price increase. Choosing the starting and ending points for data used is an easy way to deliberately manipulate statistics.

Answer 2

You know in the Sprint commercials and Verizon commercials they both say they have the world's strongest network. What does that mean? Strongest signal? Strongest because they have the most people? That's pretty misleading. They can't both be the strongest.

Also, about 80% of statistics are made up on the spot. :)

Answer 3

one of my teachers told me that he once saw the college board statistic that ap (advance placement) students (which means they take college-level classes in high school and take the ap test provided by the college board to earn college credit for that course) do better in college than people who do not take ap courses.
you tell me why this is misleading. true, but misleading.

Answer 4

I played golf with my friend. I came in second but he came in next to last.