A little dose of statistics
Posted on 08.10.05 at 15:17 CET
Nationmaster is a treasure trove of both interesting and useless statistics. You can spend ages exploring it, which is what I just did.
For example, did you know that Belgium ranks third in bottled water consumption and at number 5 for soft drinks consumption?
As far as tobacco goes, Belgium has the questionable honour of ranking in second place worldwide for its number of daily smokers. In light of this, the public opposition to a smoking ban in bars isn’t surprising.
Keeping off the roads here might be a good idea considering the fact Belgium comes in second just behind the United States for motor vehicle deaths. When you look at the number of motor vehicles per 1000 people it makes the previous stat all the more frightening: the United States is still at first place but Belgium has dropped to number 14. The roads of Belgium must be populated by homicidal maniacs…
If you should have a car crash with one of these homicidal maniacs, would you call the police? Only 51% of Belgians trust the men in blue. Talking of trust, a measly 34% of Belgians trust other people, ranking down at number 15 worldwide, that’s sad.
Even sadder is the fact that this little country is right up there on the top spot when it concerns not wanting immigrants as neighbours. Belgium’s position at number 3 for voting far-right won’t come as too much of a surprise then (Ireland at number 1 neither - their late entry into the world of immigration has provoked lots of spitting of venom).
No surprise on the tax chart either, we have a winner!
And that’s only a taste of what’s available. Dig away!
5 comments
The bottled water results may be correlated to those pitiful results ?
http://www.rferl.org/features/2003/03/05032003173611.asp
Anyway, I’ve been drinking tap water since ages, even after I could distinctly taste its chlorinated and a bit rotten taste when i came back from holidays in the swiss mountains…
I sadly understand a certain proportion of the people looking for alternatives to tap water. Right now I get real nausea when drinking more than 1 glass tapwater at a time… I use Brita filters to give it a decent taste (the cheaper alternatives didn’t remove it), and I’m happy to appreciate the many differences in water tastes.
I didn’t know the tap water was the worst but I did know we have the least water treatment plants of all Europe. Our water treatment is a disgrace and it’s only slowly changing because the European Commission is standing behind us waving its finger.
Man, that’s one convoluted looking website. There’s got to be a better way to visualize that data. The information was awesome, but man, it was confusing to get to it.
That’s sad: the Nationmaster website confirms what I thought about Belgium…
And another winning entry: Internet charges (september 2002) http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/int_int_cha
Belgium is in the top 20 for website defacements (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/med_web_def)