You may have already heard that National Geographic put together information from every single person on the planet, all seven billion of us, to come up with the world’s most average person.
That person is, drum roll please, a 28-year-old Chinese man. They then combined 190,000 pictures of 28-year old Chinese guys to create one composite picture of the world’s most typical guy. Other features include being right handed, earning $12,000 a year and having no bank account.
You can watch the video here (sorry for those in China, it is on Youtube, I couldn’t find it available on any Chinese video site.)
One of my new favorite websites, China Daily Show, had a good take on the news. (China Daily is the English language newspaper here and Daily Show is, well, I hope you know already. So China Daily News is a Chinese Onion- -aka fake news– type site.) They have an article titled: World’s Most Average Man Insists He’s Unique. Here’s an excerpt:
ZHONGCHANG (China Daily Show) Hao Ren is not a happy man. Until last week, the 28-year-old Han Chinese man thought of himself as a “pretty cool guy.”
But that was before National Geographic and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing published its “Face of Seven Billion” a ten-year study to find the world’s Most Average Man and Hao found his everyday features and lifestyle being flashed around the world.
“I’m not average,” Hao told reporters. “I’m very much my own person. I too do crazy stuff occasionally. Just last month, I forgot to snuff out a lamp when I went to bed and burnt down the pigsty!”
There is a serious side to National Geographic Average Person thing, and that is the language. The first language of the average person is Mandarin Chinese (at a whopping 13% of the world’s population. English is only the first language for 5% of the world). Its facts like that that helps me continue going to Chinese class even when I’m tired and overworked. If 1/6th of the world can speak it, why not me?
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