Many people have a bad habit of taking knowledge for granted. When it’s something a little more esoteric like advanced calculus or how to make the perfect mole poblano it can be very obnoxious and even arrogant to act like everyone should know it. But sometimes even what you consider common knowledge may be lost on others and we shouldn’t mock others for that. After all, whatever it is, there was literally a time when we had to learn that information, too.
With all that said, it can still be surprising to learn just how few people know certain things or perform certain tasks that, to many others, seem like they should be everyday things.
10. Many Americans Don’t Know Their Blood Type
Humans have four major blood types of A, B, AB, and O. Those can be broken down as negative or positive as well based on the Rh or rhesus factor. But the basic difference between the four blood types is caused by antigens in your blood.
If you ever need a blood transfusion, you’re going to want to have the right blood type. If you are given the wrong type, your immune system will react to the new blood and try to destroy it, which could be fatal. That’s a big deal so everyone needs to know their blood type, right?
While it may be true, you should know your blood type, there’s a good chance you don’t. One poll in 2020 suggested that only 62% of Americans knew their blood type, meaning 38% didn’t. At a population of 331 million, that’s 12.6 million people. A different survey the year before said 43% didn’t know their blood type.
For some perspective, about 66% of Americans know their astrological sign. Also, age has a lot to do with this information as the younger a person is, the less likely they are to know. Only 32% of Gen Z knew their blood type in one survey.
Britons seem to be in the same ballpark with more than 50% clueless about their blood type while in Asia it’s far more common to know and as many as 90% of the Japanese population are aware of their blood type.
9. Over 40% of People Don’t Know How Much Money Their Partner Makes
Do you consider marriage a true partnership? Historically, this may be a word we choose but, in action, it’s not always the case. For most of modern, Western history there’s been an imbalance where the man is the head of the house and the woman stays home.
Gradually, over the last several decades the economy and the women’s rights movements have seen a shift to a more true partnership where more women are also income earners. If you’re in such a relationship right now, do you know how much money your partner even makes? A large number of people don’t.
Data from 2015 suggested that 43% of people don’t know how much money their spouse makes. Traditionally, money has always been a thing people tend to keep secret. Employers don’t even want coworkers to know what everyone else is making in case someone finds out they make less than someone else. People guard their salary like it’s a state secret from friends and family and maybe they’ll let their lifestyle give a vague idea of how things are, but that’s all.
Six years later in 2021, numbers were not much better. Forty percent of couples who lived together were in the same boat, not knowing how much the other made. This was made even more awkward by the fact people in the survey had to guess what their partner made and it was a multiple choice question with $25,000 ranges, meaning two in 5 people guessed what their partner made incorrectly by over $25,000. At the same time, over 70% said they communicated about finances with their partners very well.
8. Over a Quarter of Americans Can’t Cook
Here’s a tough one – do you know how to cook? The word “cook” is a very vague term when you stop to ponder it. Boiling an egg is technically cooking, so if you can do that you can cook. But is that the same as making a crown rack of lamb with some dauphinoise potatoes and quenelles of a fresh mint sorbet on the side? Not exactly.
In 2011, one survey concluded that 28% of Americans couldn’t cook. In 2023, another concluded that 56% struggled to cook even basic recipes. So we have can’t and then struggled to and both are damning enough that we’ll call them “poor cooks” and leave it at that.
The first survey covered over 1,000 people over the age of 25, so we can’t claim these are college kids with no world experience.
Britain didn’t fare a lot better. In 2014 a survey suggested 10% of the population can’t cook anything at all and by that, they meant literally anything. Another 25% laid claim to only being able to cook about three things, and that included super basic dishes like eggs and porridge.
7. 3% of the Population Can’t Picture Things in Their Minds
When you hear that three percent of people can’t do a thing you can almost write it off as a statistical anomaly. Three percent is nothing, right? If you lose three percent on a test, you still get 97%. That’s basically perfect. But three percent can have significant meaning when the whole is a big enough number like the population of the earth.
At eight billion people, three percent of the population works out to 240 million. That’s more than 6 times the population of Canada. If it was a country, it would be the 5th largest country on earth with a population greater than Brazil or Russia. And that’s how many people in the world have no imagination.
Based on research, three percent of people are unable to conjure an image in their minds. So while most of us can hear the word “dog” and picture an adorable little chihuahua, 240 million people have something called aphantasia where they cannot visualize things in their minds. They can understand the concept of a dog, and describe a dog, and give you all the same dog facts you know, but for them, there is no image in their head to accompany it.
Until 2003 this phenomenon didn’t even have a name and came about after a man who had surgery reported he had lost the ability. Doctors had no way to explain it but when it made headlines tons of people wrote in to say they were the same way and had always thought when people talked about picturing things in your mind’s eye that it was metaphorical.
6. 40% of Americans Don’t Know Why They Celebrate July 4th
One of the dangers of tradition is losing the meaning behind it. Sometimes it’s a harmless adaptation, like how many people celebrate Christmas as a holiday devoid of religious connotations. But sometimes it can get a little embarrassing if you’re engaging in some celebration and you don’t even know what it’s for originally.
In 2023, a truly stunning report suggested that as many as 40% of Americans don’t know why the Fourth of July is celebrated. Despite being one of the most fiercely and clearly patriotic holidays on the calendar, the exact reason for the holiday was unknown to them.
The stat came from a poll of 1,000 people identified as born or naturalized citizens of the US.
In 2011, a similar poll concluded only 58% of Americans knew what America was celebrating. Only 76% knew which country America declared independence from, which should have informed the previous question a bit better, but obviously didn’t.
5. 70% of People Can’t Identify the Seafood They Eat
You can’t see the endless shrimp special at Red Lobster and deny the popularity of seafood. People love it. But loving it and being knowledgeable about it are two different things. According to one survey, 70% of people can’t identify what they are eating. And if that sounds preposterous, consider how well you’d do if someone placed six different, whole fish in front of you with no labels and asked you to identify each one.
In Europe, people were asked to do just that with six commonly eaten fish, and on average they got two of six correct. Brits and Belgians couldn’t quite score that high overall. Brits did the worst, and the Spanish did the best.
Part of the problem, of course, is that people often buy fish as filets rather than whole, and another problem is they’re mislabeled very often.
4. More Than Half of Americans Can’t Name All Their Grandparents
For some people, especially those in the Fast and Furious, family is everything. But for many, family bonds are not that tight. That doesn’t mean you dislike your family, either, it just means you’re not as familiar as you might think. For instance, you had four grandparents whether or not you knew them. Can you name all four?
A 2022 survey showed that 53% of Americans are unable to name all four of their grandparents. Three years earlier a different survey concluded it was a third of Americans. Average it out and still, a lot of people don’t know the names of their family members.
One in seven people had no idea what their grandparents did for a living, and 21% didn’t know where even one grandparent was born.
3. 25% of Americans Didn’t Know the Earth Orbited the Sun
There’s a lot to know in the universe and astronomy is by no means something widely taught throughout schools but the bare bones basics are usually covered early in science. Things like how many planets there are and how we all orbit the sun. But maybe some people skip that day.
The National Science Foundation conducted a poll in 2012 and discovered that 26% of people when asked if the Earth went around the sun or the sun went around the earth got the answer wrong. Only 39% of respondents answered that the universe began with an explosion, otherwise known as the Big Bang, and only 48% were on board with the idea of humans evolving from a more primitive species.
The entire survey asked 10 questions of 2,200 people and the average worked out to 65% correct answers.
2. 300 Million People in the World Don’t Have a Single Friend
Sometimes people refer to loneliness as an epidemic and that sounds very metaphorical and maybe even hyperbolic. There are eight billion people in the world, is anyone truly alone? Yes. Yes, they are.
According to polls, 300 million people in the world, which is close to the population of the entire United States, don’t have a single friend. Not one person they consider an actual friend. Over 20% of people feel like they don’t have friends or family they could count on. Now maybe some of those people are being overly dramatic and maybe not but either way it’s a very sad statistic.
Other surveys have shown that 27% of millennials report having no close friends and 22% have no friends at all. That drops to 16% for Gen X and 9% of Boomers.
1. Three Billion People Have Never Used the Internet
How important is the internet to your life? For some it’s indispensable, for others, it’s just a really nice feature. Some people even avoid it, if you can believe that. But how many people have never used it at all?
It’s easy to imagine parts of the world where no one has used the internet from the comfort of our computers and phones but the numbers are remarkably high. According to the UN, over a third of the people in the world have never used the internet. That works out to around 3 billion people, most of whom live in developing nations with limited access to things like electricity let alone YouTube. That’s close to the population of the entire world outside of Asia.
In America, where you’d be more inclined to take easy access to electronics and the internet for granted, 7% of the population, or about 23 million people, do not use the internet. Of that number, 25% are over the age of 65.