Think you can tell real facts from fake ones? Some of the most widely recognized statistics that people spout off as fact actually have no basis in reality, while others are so extreme that they'll leave you exclaiming, "Wait, that can't be right!" Take our mind-blowing facts quiz to see if you can tell truth from fiction.

As of 2010, around 84 percent of adults around the world could read -- though of course, that rate varies by location. Literacy in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is around 59 percent, and more than 47 percent of adults in the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

As of 2016, one in four U.S. schools is high-poverty -- that means 75 percent of kids qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch -- and the percent of high-poverty American schools has doubled since the '90s. Half of all black and Hispanic students in the U.S. attend high-poverty schools.

It's easy to take something as utilitarian as a toilet for granted -- until you realize that 1 in 3 people, or 2.4 billion people -- have no access to this precious necessity. A full 1 in 10 also lack access to safe water for drinking, cooking and bathing.

Thanks to 24-hour news stations, the world looks more dangerous than ever, but violent crime in the U.S. has fallen steadily since the late 20th century. Since 1991, violent crime has dropped 51 percent, while property crime has dropped 43 percent.

Virtually all red wine you buy off the shelf is ready to drink immediately, and won't get better with time. Just 1 to 2 percent of the really expensive stuff will improve if you let it hang out in your wine cellar for a few years.

Let's call this one a win for bookworms! As of 2017, there are more libraries in the U.S. than McDonald's restaurants. That means it's easier to pick up a new book than a Big Mac.

With billions of pages on the net, it's hard to believe that there's anything out there that Google hasn't seen before -- yet a full 15 percent of all daily Google searches have never been performed before.

This sensational statistic makes for eye-catching headlines, but it's simply not based in fact. One study found that one in five college students may be subject to sexual assault of some kind -- but this includes an unwanted kiss attempt in addition to more severe acts. While all unwanted sexual advances are bad news and deserve attention, cases of rape on college campuses have actually decreased significantly since the '90s.

Despite the fear-mongering associated with stranger danger, less than 1 percent of all missing kids are taken by a stranger. The vast majority are taken by someone they know or a family member.

Despite how much this stat is tossed around, this one is just not true. Around two-thirds of males born in the Soviet Union in 1923 were dead by the time WWII ended, but most of them died before the war ever started, thanks to childhood illness, normal infant mortality or starvation.

Ewww! A 2013 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health revealed that only 5 percent of people wash their hands for a full 20 seconds -- that's what the CDC recommends to kill germs -- after using a public restroom. Even worse, a third of people wash hands without any soap, and one in ten skip hand-washing entirely.

Kids from families on welfare hear an average of 616 words per hour, compared to 2,153 words per hour for kids in the most well-off families. By age three, this translates to a 30-million word gap, which can have serious implications for achievement and learning that lasts well beyond the early years.

This one gets thrown around a lot, but there just isn't any evidence to support it. MIT Professor Dick Larson, known as Dr. Queue for his work on lines and queuing, estimates that people with extensive commutes may spend one to two years waiting in line in their lives, if you count all that time stuck in traffic.

In a 2013 study of European airline pilots, a whopping 56 percent admitted to sleeping in the cockpit. Want to hear something even scarier than that? Almost a third of those pilots who copped to getting some shut-eye revealed that they had once woken up to find that their co-pilot was also asleep, leaving no one conscious at the controls.

This fact has been thrown around for so long that many people are stunned to learn it's just not true. Modern PET and MRI scans of brain activity show that humans use way more than 10 percent of their gray matter on a regular basis -- though it might seem like some people use way less.

According to the National Safety Council, your lifetime odds of dying from legal execution -- think lethal injection or the electric chair -- are 1 in 119,000. When it comes to being struck by lightning, the odds jump to 1 in 161,000.

If you're looking at an average level of intelligence, you have to accept the fact that half the people are smarter than average, and half the people are, well, less smart. Take a look at cold, hard numbers and you'll find that only 4 percent cop to being less intelligent than the average person.

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