Excerpt from The World of to-Day: Official Statistics What They Contain and How to Use Them These summaries, however, can only be used safely by those who have already made themselves familiar from the original reports with the exact meaning of the material they contain if, for example, one knows what is officially understood by a change Of wages, or by export of foreign or colonial goods, one can use the Abstracts for following their variations year by year. The first thing to realise about official, and indeed all, statistics, is that their meaning is always technical and generally not precisely that which might at first sight be expected. Some examples will Show how the conditions of collecting data and the difficulties of definition result in strained use of words. The recorded population of Brighton is the total of the number of persons who happened to sleep in the borough on a particular night in April, 1911. Exports are classified as of home production, even if their materials are of foreign origin, if the final manufacturing process was done in this country. The measurement of the change of the cost of living is made on the hypothesis that people purchase precisely the same kind and quality of goods as it is assumed they did in 1914 on the basis of an investigation in 1904. The total income paying tax in a particular year is a medley of the incomes received by people in the previous three or even five years, and contains the rents (or a fraction or multiple of the rents) About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.