TED演讲:为什么你应该热爱统计学(7)

 How about the next question? This is asking about what the average age is, 那么下一个问题呢？这是问关于年龄的中位数，

so the age at which half the population are younger and half the population are older. 也就是该地区大于和小于这个年龄的人口数相等。

And I thought 35 -- that sounds middle-aged¹ to me. 我以为是35--那对我来说是中年。

Actually, in Exeter, it's incredibly young, and I had underestimated the impact of the university in this area. 实际上，在埃克塞特，结果是惊人的年轻，是我低估了大学在这个区域的影响。

The questions get harder as you go through. So this one's now asking about homeownership: 随着测试的进行，问题的难度会增加。这个问题有关房屋所有权：

For every 100 households, how many are owned with a mortgage or loan? 在一百个家庭中，有多少个是有贷款或借债的？

And I hedged my bets here, because I didn't want to be more than 50 out on the answer. 我没有直接选出脑海中的数字，因为我不想有超过五十个。

And actually, these get harder, these questions, 实际上，这些问题变得越来越困难，

because when you're in an area, when you're in a community, things like age -- there are clues to whether a population is old or young. 因为当你在一个地区，在一个社区，人口是否老龄化或是年轻化这样的事情，是很容易找到线索的。

Just by looking around the area, you can see it. 看看周围环境就知道了。

Something like homeownership is much more difficult to see, 像房屋所有权这样的事要观察起来就困难得多，

and so we revert² to our own heuristics, our own biases³ about how many people we think own their own homes. 所以我们还原了我们的启发法，关于我们自认为有多少人拥有房屋所有权的偏差。

Now the truth is, when we published this quiz, the census⁴ data that it's based on was already a few years old. 然而真相是，当我们发表这个测试时，我们所依据的普查数据已经是好几年前的了。

We've had online applications that allow you to put in a post code and get statistics back for years. 我们有一个在线应用，你可以输入邮编，然后得到过去几年的数据。

So in some senses, this was all a little bit old and not necessarily new. 所以，在某种程度上，这是有点儿过时的数据。

But I was interested to see what reaction we might get by gamifying the data in the way that we have, 但是我很感兴趣会得到什么样的反应，用我们已有的方式去使数据游戏化，

by using animation⁵ and playing on the fact that people have their own preconceptions. 通过使用动画以及利用人们会有先入之见这一事实。

It turns out, the reaction was, um ... was more than I could have hoped for. 结果是，反应... 比我所期望的要好。

It was a long-held ambition of mine to bring down a statistics website due to public demand. 对我来说，运营数据网站需要持久的雄心，因为公众有着庞大的需求。

1 middle-aged   

adj.中年的

参考例句：

• I noticed two middle-aged passengers.我注意到两个中年乘客。
• The new skin balm was welcome by middle-aged women.这种新护肤香膏受到了中年妇女的欢迎。

2 revert   

v.恢复，复归，回到

参考例句：

• Let us revert to the earlier part of the chapter.让我们回到本章的前面部分。
• Shall we revert to the matter we talked about yesterday?我们接着昨天谈过的问题谈，好吗？

3 biases   

偏见( bias的名词复数 )； 偏爱； 特殊能力； 斜纹

参考例句：

• Stereotypes represent designer or researcher biases and assumptions, rather than factual data. 它代表设计师或者研究者的偏见和假设，而不是实际的数据。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• The net effect of biases on international comparisons is easily summarized. 偏差对国际比较的基本影响容易概括。

4 census   

n.(官方的)人口调查，人口普查

参考例句：

• A census of population is taken every ten years.人口普查每10年进行一次。
• The census is taken one time every four years in our country.我国每四年一次人口普查。

5 animation   

n.活泼，兴奋，卡通片／动画片的制作

参考例句：

• They are full of animation as they talked about their childhood.当他们谈及童年的往事时都非常兴奋。
• The animation of China made a great progress.中国的卡通片制作取得很大发展。