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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello, this is the investigations team at More or Less. Please leave your statistical query after the tone and we'll investigate.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. This week we thought we'd dedicate the programme to answering as many listener queries as we can and I've got two of our top sleuths in the studio to help answer your questions, Charlotte and Ian. Hi Ruth.
Hello.
Let's get to our first query then, which came to us through Twitter using hashtag BBC More or Less. It's from an American anthropologist who's been to record the music of the Maasai tribe in Kenya.
Dear more or less, my name is Hans Johnson and I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. Throughout my studies, I've come across the figure of one million being the estimated population of the Maasai. And I'm just wondering how accurate that figure is and if it's even current.
Well, the Maasai are a traditionally nomadic group who live in the south of Kenya and the north of Tanzania. Charlotte, you've been looking into Hans's question.
Yeah, the figure of one million Maasai is reported all over the place. I spoke to Ernestina Coast, an associate professor of population studies at the London School of Economics, and she traced the number back to a report from 1998, but it didn't give any evidence for where that number comes from.
OK, so the figure's about 15 years old then. Do we have any official figures we can look at?
Yes, there were around 840,000 people who identified themselves as Maasai in Kenya's census of 2009. Unfortunately, in Tanzania, the census doesn't ask for ethnic group or tribe, so we don't have a figure for them. Ernestina explains why.
In Tanzania, a very different approach was taken that said, first and foremost, we are Tanzanians. and our tribal affiliation or our ethnic group is much less important. So they stopped collecting any ethnicity data.
Some even doubt the Kenya number. I spoke to Kakuta, founder of the Maasai Association. He says because of a Maasai tradition of not telling people how many children a family has, not all Maasai will be counted in the census.
Traditionally, a family will not tell you how many children they have. And they often either refuse to participate in censor taking or give the wrong information to the censor takers. It's a tradition that goes back for generations and generations.
So Hans, we can't trust the Kenyan census figure 100% and we don't have a figure for Tanzania at all. One million might not be far off, but we just can't know for sure.
Let's go!
My name's Paul and I'm calling from Dubai. I read in Time magazine that a quarter of Americans and a third of Europeans are unaware that the Earth goes round the sun, so they know something that the rest of us don't.
Well, Paul, thank you, and I do share your surprise that so many people apparently don't know that the Earth goes round the sun. Ian, you've been looking into this statistic and where it comes from. Is it based on some dodgy poll?
Not at all. It actually comes from the National Science Federation, which is a US government agency, which has been asking this question as part of its survey for public attitudes to science since 1988. It asks a variety of science general knowledge questions, such as... Well, actually, Ruth, why don't you have a go at this one?
Go on, then.
The centre of the Earth is very hot. True or false? And take your time.
How many Maasai people really live in Kenya and Tanzania?
True. Correct. But don't feel too smug, Ruth, because that was the question that most people got right at 86%. Now, the wording of the question we're talking about is… Does the Earth go around the Sun or does the Sun go around the Earth? That's Tom W. Smith from the University of Chicago, which carried out this research.
Do we have any idea why so many people get this question wrong?
Well, Tom Smith does have a theory. Most of these questions involve… having learned a scientific fact and remembering it. But if someone goes outside and observes the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west each day, that casual non-scientific observation might well lead them to take in the belief that the sun is revolving around the earth.
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