5%

I remember when I was in the 6th grade, I did my PYP exhibition on cleft palate. I wanted to display a statistic saying "__% of children will have cleft palate". But I couldn't be bothered to look up statistics because I figured it would be a huge amount of numbers. I was 11 years old! I didn't want to have to trawl through numbers. I also didn't want to look at more pictures of cleft lip. This was, like, two hours before the exhibition started. So i made one up. I wanted to make it a small number, obviously, but large enough to be shocking. The shock factor was important. So I picked 5. And during the exhibition this lady was like "5%? Wow that's a lot!" and I was like "Yeah :-/ It's really sad." And nobody questioned me or anything.

Sometimes I remember this. I can't believe I did that. 5 percent! That's 1 in 20 people. That is a HUGE number. And I got away with it. I just made up a totally implausible number on the spot and nobody said anything. Iconic. 5 percent.