There’s .3% to .5% chance that a birth will result in identical twins.
Although about 3 in 100 births will yield twins, only 3-5 in 1,000 will result in identical twins. Don’t even get me started on triplets or higher!
Your odds of winning the lottery are wildly low.
According to Lottery USA, each ticket’s odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are – brace yourselves – 1 in 302,575,350. Even winning just $10 or more on a Megaplier is a 1 in 15 shot.
Revealing a royal flush on a first hand will probably only happen in a James Bond movie.
The odds of being dealt a royal flush – the highest-winning hand in poker – in your first round of cards is 1 in 649,740. There are 2,598,960 possible 5-card combos and just 4 of them will yield a winning royal flush.
The odds of making a hole-in-one are pretty slim.
According to Golf Digest, an amateur golfer’s chances of hitting a hole-in-one are 1 in 12,500.
A professional golfer’s are 1 in 2,500.
Babies aren’t switched at birth very often.
While this seems to be something that happens A LOT on TV, there were only 8 documented instances of this occurring in the U.S. between 1995 and 2008.
You’re probably not going to be audited on your taxes.
Another thing that gets sensationalized in media but doesn’t really happen. In 2017, the IRS audited 1.1 million tax returns, which sounds like a lot but only made up 0.5% of the 196 million returns.
Only 1% of the population is ambidextrous.
About 90% of the population is right-handed, 10% are left-handed and only about 1% are ambidextrous.
Getting a perfect NCAA bracket is nearly impossible.
The odds of correctly picking all 32 games are 1 in 2.4 trillion. Yeah, that ain’t happenin’.
CPR has an extremely low rate of success.
Medical shows make it seem like correctly-performed CPR will always revive the patient but the odds really aren’t in their favor. The rate of survival is about 12% for cardiac arrests that occur outside hospitals and between 24% and 40% for in-hospital arrests.
You probably won’t die from being struck by lightning.
A person has a 1-in-15,300 chance of getting struck by lightening in their lifetime but only an estimated 10% of cases where it actually happens were fatal.
Sharks are more likely to be killed by humans than humans are to be killed by sharks.
Your odds of being attacked by a shark are merely 1 in 3,748,067 but nearly 11,000 sharks are killed by humans every hour (100 million/year).
Statistically, air travel is the safest form of travel and you have less to fear in the sky than on the ground.
You actually have a much higher likelihood of being in a car crash than a plane crash. According to 2017 census data, you have a 1 in 103 chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident as opposed to a 1 in 188,364 chance of dying as an airplane passenger in your lifetime.
Four-leaf clovers are 1 in 10,000.
Today might not be your lucky day. One in 10,000 is a fairly standard deviation for a rare expression in a plant species.
You can only see pandas at four zoos in the United States.
In order to conserve habitats and protect Giant Pandas, the Chinese government gifted or loaned them to 4 zoos in the U.S.: Zoo Atlanta, the San Diego Zoo, Memphis Zoo, and the Smithsonian National Zoo.
There’s no such thing as a photographic memory…Or is there?
Almost no one has a photographic memory so it’s widely debated if it even exists. There’s actually no evidence suggesting it’s possible but researchers are still studying the matter thanks to people who swear they have the ability.
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Well, yes. That's why we use it. But it's more a point that movies make us believe that it's always successful I think.
In addition, each game isn’t like a coin flip, where there's a 50/50 chance of guessing it correctly.
OR you lived above a leprechaun's hole.
Yeah, I found a patch of four leaves ar my summer camp. I took a pic of the ground and counted later (non digital days). If you find one, more are nearby.
The odds of being killed by a cow are very low except never zero.
People killed by sharks per year on average: 5.
People killed by cows per year on average: 22.
And the point was obviously that we may have to be careful around them, but sharks are not an animal that immediately goes to kill every human they see.
And about 10% of the people worldwide are left handed. If you have a logical reason why that's different in the American Midwest, do tell.