Math Sucks!
There are currently around 311 million people* residing in the USA. That’s a hard number for a person to perceive, so let me help. If you could say, “Hello” to everyone of them, on some sort of revolving conveyor belt, as they passed you – one “Hello” per second – it would take you almost 10 straight years just to get through the greeting process…and that’s not taking into account your need to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom.
My countrymen and women are not doing so well on general knowledge tests and as each year passes they do worse and worse. Let’s just take a look at some more numbers shall we?
1 in a 1,000 Americans say they read. But this is generalized, mind you. When pushed as to frequency and quantity of reading this one in a thousand gives vague responses like newspapers and magazine articles.
1 in 10,000 Americans are classified as Avid Readers. Keep in mind you are now an avid reader if you can manage to read one book for pleasure a month.
So that means that 31,100 books are being read per month in the USA for leisure purposes. But, I have to add a little here, because, though I’m not polishing off the five a week I could in my twenties before I had kids, I’m still reading more than one book a month. I say there must be others like me out there. Maybe half of the avid readers are consuming more than one? For an even number let’s say 50,000. That looks better, more impressive, huh? Americans read 50,000 books per month for fun.
Now our good friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics claim the average American watches 2.7 hours of TV a day. This number is down actually thanks to social media like Facebook and Twitter, because more folks are scrolling stalker-like through their Ex’s profiles and posting pictures of their lunches. I remain dubious as to if that is better than Survivor and Sports Center.
But let’s compare that 50,000 we felt so pleased with moments ago to the number of hours spent watching TV. Though we know better, I say remove those 31,100 pesky Avid Readers from the equation. If they have time to squeeze in a book a month, how much TV can they be watching? *Wink Wink*
That leaves 310,968,900 average Americans watching 2.7 hours of TV per day = 839,616,030 hours of TV watched per day! Then per month = 26 Billion hours of TV! or 26,000,000,000.
Anybody else feel that 50,000 books per month just took one hell of a pride nosedive?
*All the statistics in this article are averaged from multiple sources. Welcome to the digital age where every organization – private and publicly funded, runs polls and surveys with varying results and accuracy. The mean results are not meant to be mean (oh the wit), but for your eye-opening edification. Besides if you want an APA bibliography it would be longer than the bloody article, so just enjoy. Oh alright at least one link http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm
