Daniel Maldonado

1. This first sentence is italicized purposefully to add emphasis to the importance of it. It basically represents the overall motive that Levitt and Dubner had in mind for their book. People now are very aware of things that are happening because of the news and the multiple experts that claim to know the reasons for these happenings. One usually believes what he reads on Yahoo News, but there is usually a lot more to a something than just what they tell you. Regardless of the position that one has on abortions, one would have never thought that this was one of the main reasons for the drop in crime. This is because no sources will ever publish this since there is so much controversy around this topic. The sources might not even have known this. Before someone measures data on a topic, one must know what the right data to measure is and how to measure it. This is exactly what the first sentence of this quote is saying. People just measure the obvious which in this case would be the number of police officers or how accessible weapons are. Knowing the truth makes the world that we live in a lot less complicated than it is.

2. Measure. Measuring data is probably the foundation of this book. I was surprised to see that every conclusion that Levitt and Dubner came up with was backed up by facts that were achieved from reliable and relevant research. When the right things are measured which most of the time are not the most obvious things, the right answer is found. The repetition of the word measure shows the reader that measurements are the key to resolving the confusion that we are faced with in life.

3. Once one learns to look at data in the right way, he is able to come up with an accurate conclusion about his topic. Levitt and Dubner obviously already know how to look at data in the right way since they can compare two things that would seem completely different, such as the Ku Klux Klan and your every day real estate agent. Code words have been a huge part in both the KKK and real estate agents, and uncovering what those codes are gives an outsider an advantage when dealing with either one of these. The authors of this book must have done a lot of research with many different trials to find out what the code words of the real estate agents were. To do this they probably talked to many different real estate agents and looked at ads in magazines or catalogues to finally figure out what reoccurring words matched high or low priced houses. They could confidently come up with the conclusions they made because they knew how to look at the data they had and how to analyze it correctly.

4. So many things seem improbable or impossible because we are told the opposite by our peers or by sources that we think are reliable. If you take time to look at all of the factors that might influence whatever this may be, there is always a probability that you will find out the opposite. Its not that the authors disproved things that seemed impossible throughout this book, they proved things that people didn’t really think about because the media or just society in general has taught them differently. Levitt and Dubner explained why students from