I believe, Leeneia, that a statistic really is a statistic.

The question is, is it a *true* statistic?

And if it is true, what - if anything - can logically be deduced from it?

Rule of thumb: a true statistic, all by itself, cannot lead to a sound conclusion.

Example: "The US population is 300,000,000."

So what? That doesn't even prove the US is a large country, because the statistic alone doesn't give us anything to compare itself to.

Is 300,000,000 people a lot for one country? It depends.

It's patterns that count, not isolated statistics.