I think that statistics play a very important role in our society because with social media, people’s opinions are easily swayed by information online. It is hard to know if the facts you read are true or not. Many people blindly trust statistics, not realizing that they are not always reliable. However, they are a quick way to learn about things.

Something new that I learned is that the results of surveys can be written to portray them as a bigger deal than they are. The difference between words and numbers, for example, never occurred to me.

Some problems with statistics are that they are very easily manipulated. The group of voters surveyed can be rigged, the way that the questions are worded can be biased, and the way the results are presented can be dramatized.