When asked how much the government had spent on the health service in the previous year, people’s answers ranged from £7 million to £7 trillion – a pretty wide range, considering that the correct answer was roughly £70 billion. Clearly, most of them had no idea. If they’d thought about it a little more incisively, as the writers of The Tiger That Isn’t point out, they’d have realised that they were suggesting that the NHS budget was either limited to 12p per head or that it stretched to £120,000 for every single person in the country. 

This is the first of the book’s many real-life examples of how numbers are misunderstood, but the others are much more alarming. The writers present, in an entertaining manner, stories of journalists, politicians, civil servants and physicians failing to understand the statistics in the areas we expect them to know most about. In many of these cases, the misunderstanding is passed along to us, the public, through misleading headlines and policy promises that sound far more impressive than they really are. The examples are up-to-date and relevant to UK current affairs – yob culture, speed cameras and hospital waiting lists are among the issues the writers have chosen in which the statistics have been bungled.

After reading some of the more shocking examples, it would be easy to take a cynical viewpoint on any and all statistics we read. However, The Tiger That Isn’t attempts to convince you that you would be better off trying to understand them instead. Each chapter tackles a certain section of statistics (such as ‘Counting’, ‘Averages’ or ‘Measurement’), first giving the ‘what not to do’ examples and then explaining what you must do to avoid being taken in by statistics that are misleading, vague, or just false. It’s a formulaic approach, but it works: each section manages to explain several simple concepts in quite some detail, but it ever strays too close to becoming dull and mundane.

One point that should be made is that, despite being a book about numbers, The Tiger That Isn’t doesn’t delve too deeply into mathema-tics. You won’t see a hint of any kind of formula, and the maths involved rarely gets much more complicated than basic multiplication and division. This may be a negative for some readers, but it makes the book very accessible for those who aren’t well acquainted with the subject matter. If you’re looking for an introduction to advanced statistics, this isn’t the book for you. However, if you’re looking for a light-hearted read about using numbers in everyday life, The Tiger That Isn’t is very enjoyable.