Your home county is above average, right?
But in what?
Above average in education? Great! But in time spent commuting to work? Ugh.
Enter your county here. I built a quick quiz to show you how it stacks up.
Out of these four categories, which one do you think ranks highest in nationally?
Some data points are intuitively correlated. Low education and high smoking rates, we all get that. But some are harder to figure.
Here’s a map showing the counties with the highest concentration of people who moved in from another state or county in the last five years.
What’s the strongest predictor of a county landing high on that scale?
Every county is remarkable in some ways, but because of, you know, math, it must be average in something.
Which of these do you think is closest to the national average in?
Of the 3,144 counties (or county-like things) in the U.S. only 12 of them have zero percent covered in any lake, river or other body of water.
Of the 22 factors that I assembled for this quiz, which one do you think is most correlated with a high percent of the county covered in water?
Data can often be surprising like that. Often the details can be grim, but they are often noteworthy. When an organization publishes new data it always gets attention and it certainly establishes that organization as thoughtfully leading on the topic, whatever it is.
If you came to this quiz from someone else, my name is Scott Yates. I enjoy bringing my experience as a journalist, a startup founder, a patent holder, and an advocate of fixing Daylight Saving Time to work on projects that result in uncovering data that will get noticed. If you have some kind of data that you think is out there and just needs to get coaxed out to help you or your organization reach its goals, well, maybe we should chat?
But if you just enjoyed playing and learned a little new tidbit about your home, that’s awesome! Feel free to share this with a friend or two.
-Scott
Play again!