British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows – Home News – UK – The Independent. via Lyndon Walker
This article compares survey results of people’s opinions about prevalence of certain things compared with actual statistical data about those same things.
For example:
Immigration: some 31 per cent of the population is thought to consist of recent immigrants, when the figure is actually 13 per cent. Even including illegal immigrants, the figure is only about 15 per cent. On the issue of ethnicity, black and Asian people are thought to make up 30 per cent of the population, when the figure is closer to 11 per cent.
or:
Teen pregnancy is thought to be 25 times higher than the official estimates: 15 per cent of of girls under 16 are thought to become pregnant every year, when official figures say the amount is closer to 0.6 per cent.
or:
Among the other surprising figures are that 26 per cent of people think foreign aid is in the top three items the Government spends money on (it actually makes up just 1.1 per cent of expenditure), and that 29 per cent of people think more is spent on Jobseekers’ Allowance than pensions.In fact we spend 15 times more on pensions – £4.9 billion on JSA vs £74.2 billion on pensions
