Using simple division, China halves divorce rate

From the Daily India we learn that China's statisticians messed up in their calculations of the national divorce rate.:

China has halved its divorce rate after statisticians admitted that they had counted the number of people and not the number of divorces in the annual figure, state media said Friday.

The official divorce rate is likely to drop from 2.76 per 1,000 in 2005 to about 1.3 per 1,000 last year, the official China Daily newspaper said. (emphasis ours)

Hmmm. So where did these folks get their Ph.D.'s in statistics? The Daily India also managed to spell "statistics" as "stattistics" by incorrectly doubling the number of second T's in "statistics."

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