You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
3 million students
Nearly 3 million students in the U.S. struggle to overcome the so-called homework gap — a difficulty presented by the absence of internet in the home as a result of its cost or availability — according to an Associated Press analysis of census data. Seventeen percent of students do not have access to a computer at home and 18 percent do not have access to broadband internet. [Associated Press]
48 percent of respondents
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll asked U.S. adults about their opinions on presidential candidates’ age and sexual orientation. Overall, 48 percent of the respondents said they were “much” or “somewhat” less likely to support someone if he or she was older than 70. Thirty-four percent said they were less likely to vote for someone who is gay. Twelve percent were more likely to vote for a gay candidate wile 11 percent said they were more likely to support a candidate over 70. [Reuters]
$1 trillion
As of the end of last week, Microsoft was worth north of $1 trillion-with-a-T dollars, making it the U.S.’s most valuable company, ahead of Amazon and Apple which hover around an $880 billion market cap. The dramatic rise in the company’s value under its CEO Satya Nadella has been driven at least in part by “investor optimism about Microsoft’s cloud services business.” [Quartz]
19 presidential candidates
My home state of Iowa is beginning to swallow its quadrennial megadose of attention. With eight months until the caucuses, 19 Democratic presidential candidates (and that’s not even all of them) spoke for five minutes apiece at a DoubleTree Hotel in Cedar Rapids on Sunday, in an event complete with those timeless campaign staples: pizza, bagpipes, dancing, a taco truck, and John Mellencamp’s song “Small Town.” [The Atlantic]
$4.7 billion
According to a study by the News Media Alliance, thanks its News and search products, Google made $4.7 billion dollars last year off of the work of news publishers. The alliance said that its estimate was conservative, and that number compares to the $5.1 billion made by the entire news industry from digital advertising last year. “These back-of-the envelope calculations are inaccurate,” Google said in statement. [The New York Times]
2 million kilograms of mangoes
Thanks to weather patterns apparently driven by El Niño, the Philippines has a huge surplus of mangoes — more than two million kilograms of mangoes, to be precise. The government there has begun a marketing campaign to sell a million of those kilograms this month, and in some places mangoes are selling for less than 40 cents each. Smoothies for days. [BBC]
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