STATISTICS: Lobster? Deuteronomy?

Last month, while Dr. Gallup was on vacation, his staff at Princeton, N.J. drew up an odd lot of questions designed to give some kind of picture of Homo americanus. Some results:

¶ Out of 102 million U.S. adults, approximately half have visited Chicago and New York City. About 5.5 million men have been to London, 6.5 million to Paris—a large percentage of them by courtesy of the U.S. armed forces.

¶ Ten million women and 7.5 million men have read the Bible all the way through.

¶ Eleven million men and 10 million women have written their Congressmen.

¶ Slightly more than half the adult population have eaten lobsters.

¶ Some 62% of all men and 27% of the women have played poker for money; 17 million men and 11 million women have bet money at a race track.

¶ Half of all U.S. men have had a fist fight since they were 15, but only one woman in ten has engaged in a hair-pulling match. Seventeen percent of men admit they have hit their wives, and 18% of women say they have struck their husbands.

¶ A total of 32 million men and 10 million women have gone swimming in the nude.

¶ Eighteen million Americans have seen Harry Truman in person.

¶ Nineteen million have gone hungry for lack of money.

¶ Half of American adult males and a third of females have stayed out all night on a party.

¶ Ten million men and 4,000,000 women have pawned something in their lifetime.

¶ Some 28.5 million men and 11.5 million women claim they have caught a fish weighing more than two pounds.

¶ Twenty percent of all women and 8% of the men have been telephoned on a radio-TV quiz.