I am loving that I came up with my title the way that I did....this is a quote often attributed to Mark Twain...but he stole it from Benjamin Disraeli. And then it makes me think of the great episode from the first season of the West Wing.
It came to mind today because I first saw this graphic on Facebook:
I opened it up because I wanted to paste it in here..but then I got wondering about where these statistics came from. So I went to the original website and found the link above. He learned that his stats might not be true....and that's a bummer to me because a couple of them actually seemed legit. Like the high school grad and college grad one....the no bookstore one makes sense if they are only counting stuff like Barnes and Noble because most people buy online now. I really wanted to know more about the chosen field one--that is actually not bad.
On the website he created a new graphic....which keeps that 7 years idea...which is apparently not a statistic....just a nice thought.
This still has some interesting numbers on it...but it is mostly just about literacy--but that reading frequency declines and over the age of 16 ones sound about right too. What this whole situation really shows me is that we can't trust statistics....they really can be just lies like Israeli and Twain have said. What do you think?
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