percentages can be particularly misleading when applied to small basis you might read about drug that has side effect of increasing the incidence of some illness by but if the base incidence of the disease is very lowsay one in , , you might well decide that the risk of taking the drug was more than counterbalanced by the drug' positive effects just beware it would be easyand funto fill few hundred pages with history of statistical abuses but by now you probably got the messageit' just as easy to lie with numbers as it is to lie with words make sure that you understand what is actually being measured and how those "statistically significantresults were computed before you jump to conclusions