12 Statistical World Facts That Even Those Who Hate Numbers Find Interesting

Data is all around us but nowadays information usually comes in the form of numbers. How a player performed last night is usually reduced to the number of points he or she accumulates for that game. How well a company does is usually predicated on a set of numbers and figures.

So just like with our world, we view progress or regression from a standpoint of numbers, whether they be total human population, infant mortality rates or simply the average IQ.

But here are 13 facts about the world that you may not have known before.

1. According to Big Think, Russia is more than 1000 times larger than Bangladesh however in terms of population Bangladesh beats Russia. According to the World Bank, Russia has a population of approximately 144 million people while Bangladesh has a population of 163 million people. According to World Population Review, Bangladesh is the 9th most densely populated country in the world.

2. The National Geographic Twitter account recently tweeted: ‘there are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way—and what they do for the planet is amazing.’ A USA Today article stated that the Earth contains more than three trillion trees and that scientists believe that number to be accurate. The same article goes on to point Russia for being the number one country in terms of trees followed by Canada, Brazil, and the United States.

3. According to a report done by The Guardian, Germany has the lowest birth rate in all of Europe and one of the lowest in the world. Germany has, on average, 1.36 children per woman in Europe which puts them at the lowest in all of Europe. According to their national statistics office, there were fewer babies born in the year of 2011 than at any other time in their history. A new study in 2015, which was reported on by the BBC, found that Germany had surpassed Japan as being the country with the lowest birth rate in the world.

4. According to the United States’ Social Security Administration, from the years 1917 all the way up to 2016, the most common name for boys was James while Mary was the most common name for girls. There are approximately 5 million Jameses born between that time followed by 3.5 million Marys.

5. According to the Gold Reserves, the United States is the largest gold holding country in the world as of November 2017. The central bank of the United States has approximately 8133.5 metric tons of gold. While China is ranked sixth on this list, China is mining more gold from within their own country than anywhere else.

6. As reported by the United Nations, the current world population is 7.3 billion people and that number is only going to increase. The UN estimates that by 2030, the earth’s population will be near 8.5 billion people while by 2100, the population is estimated to be about 11.2 billion people. Over the past one thousand years, the human population has grown more than twenty times in size!

7. According to Health.com, the average American takes about 4,774 steps a day which is slightly below the worldwide average of 4,961 steps a day. Extrapolating this data and using the average life expectancy of 80 years, scientists deduced that a human being can walk around the world 4 times given that they take an average of 5,000 steps a day and walking nearly 180,000 kilometers in their lifetime.

8. According to the NY Daily News, the average American watches more than five hours of television every single day. The article revealed that once we pass the age of 65 the amount of television we watch increases to about 7 hours a day! The Nielsen study which conducted this investigation found that radio was the most effective medium in 2016 with more than 240 million users while live television was a distant second with 226 million users.

9. According to Today.com, the most common day for babies to be born is a Tuesday followed by the next most common day, Monday. The highest percentage of births happened at around 8 in the morning or around noon. According to a Cisco report, 9 percent of all email that is sent worldwide is spam! Cisco, which is a computer networking company, says that about 200 billion email messages are sent daily which is complete spam. The report went on to indicate that the United States is the number one source of spam followed by Turkey and then Russia.

10. According to an article in the World Economic Forum, mothers from Denmark had the highest percentage of employment while being a mother. The report stated that more than 80 per cent of Danish mothers were working with Sweden, Slovenia and the Netherlands not far behind.

11. McDonald’s is so popular that it has a website dedicated to showing off the statistics that it owns. This website tracks how many of their most famous products are sold BY THE SECOND! For instance, every second McDonald’s sells about 75 burgers worldwide, while every five seconds about 500 pounds of fries are sold and every 20 seconds approximately 50 Big Macs are sold across the world.

12. According to Fortune.com, a Bloomberg report showed that on average 1,700 Americans a day become millionaires. The article went on to state that there are approximately 8 million American households with assets worth more than one million dollars in the year of 2017.

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