Question About Common Statistics?

Published August 16, 2010

Question by SomeGuy: Question about common statistics?
By “common statistics”, I mean the kind that you see in commercials. An example would be “Every 10 seconds, someone in America dies of a car accident”.

How exactly do they come up with that? It’s obvious that every 10 seconds, an animal isn’t abused, or that every 10 seconds, a car accident happens. But these statistics are clearly based off of fact. So does anyone know how they come up with these?

Sorry if this is in the wrong section.

Best answer:

Answer by Math Help Guy
What they are giving you is an average. For example, say a certain state has 8760 car accidents in one year. This means, on average, there is 1 car accident every hour. In reality, there isn’t an accident every single hour, but the AVERAGE is 1 accident per hour.

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