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How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them)
Tom Chivers, David Chivers
Mathematics, Probability & statistics, Applied mathematics, Popular science, Popular mathematics
A short, practical, timely guide to the tools you need to understand the numbers we read in the news everyday - and how we often get them wrong
Every day, most of us will read or watch something in the news that is based on statistics in some way. Sometimes it'll be obvious - 'X people develop cancer every year' - and sometimes less obvious - 'How smartphones destroyed a generation'. Statistics are an immensely powerful tool for understanding the world, but in the wrong hands they can be dangerous.
Introducing you to the common mistakes that journalists make and the tricks they sometimes deploy, HOW TO READ NUMBERS is a vital guide that will help you understand when and how to trust the numbers in the news - and, just as importantly, when not to.
More books by Tom Chivers
Praise for How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them)
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A charming, practical and insightful guide. You might not even notice how much you're learning - you'll be too busy having fun
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Reading this book is strongly correlated with not looking stupid. Highly recommended
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A vital plea to take statistics more seriously - the prose being as clear and elegant as the numbers
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Wonderfully written - incredibly readable. It should be made compulsory reading for everyone before they leave school
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An excellent guide to everyday statistics . . . the authors do a splendid job of stringing words together so smartly that even difficult concepts are explained and so understood with ease. [A] timely and lively book - THE TIMES
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An erudite, enlightening guide to the numbers we read in the news - and why they are so often wrong. The authors make sense of dense material and offer engrossing insights into sampling bias, statistical significance and the dangers of believing the casual language used in newspapers - INDEPENDENT
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[A] fascinating, easy-to-read explanation of how to interpret numbers in the news . . . their enlightening book provides us with the tools to spot when we're being led astray - DAILY MAIL
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A great combination of important and accessible
Tom Chivers
Tom Chivers is a science writer and author. He was given Royal Statistical Society 'Statistical Excellence in Journalism' awards in 2018 and 2020, and was declared the Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers in 2021. His two previous books are The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy and How to Read Numbers (with David Chivers).
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