Quantitative Literacy and Statistics

Who would disagree that college graduates (not to mention high school graduates) should be able to understand and correctly interpret disease or unemployment rates, the comparative costs of two car or apartment rental agreements, and the trends in the composition of the country's population? Yet many of these graduates are mystified by quantitative arguments, a mystification that ranges from minor confusion in some to functional illiteracy in others. As the world of the information age becomes more quantitative, the ability of people to deal with numerical issues of practical consequence is shrinking.