Blog Posts by Book of Odds

If your kids are 13 to 17, there's a 1 in 8.33 chance that they're playing video games, with boys being much more likely to spend their time after school with a video game controller in hand than girls (1 in 5.26 to 1 in 25). One thing you don't need to worry too much about is how long teens are playing. Most report playing for between 1 and 5 hours a week (1 in 2.5), while only 1 in 7.69 says they are playing video games for at least 20 hours in a given week.

The more important question here may be: "Do you know what your children are playing?" While 90% of parents say they always or sometimes know what video games their children are playing, 1 in 3.57 parents do not understand how video game ratings work. This means that even though most may know what game a child is playing, there are many parents that don't know if it is appropriate for their child to be playing it.

Of the top 20 bestselling video games in 2008, 1 in 5 were rated Teen, and 1 in 3.33 were rated Mature.

Easter

By just about any count you can find, Christianity is the largest religion in the world. Adherents.com figures there are about 2.1 billion Christians on the planet, counting all the myriad denominations. Other estimates put the total somewhat lower, but they don't challenge the number one status, population-wise, of the faith founded on the teachings of that humble Jewish preacher two thousand years ago.

So if you're celebrating Easter Sunday with a family dinner, Easter egg hunts and bunnies, or maybe even going to church, you're in massive company.

In the US, the odds an adult celebrates Easter are 1 in 1.27 (79%)-not as high as the 1 in 1.1 (91%) odds of celebrating Christmas but pretty impressive nonetheless. More women (1 in 1.2-83%) celebrate Easter than men (1 in 1.35-74%). But what does "celebrate" mean? Here's what Americans are actually doing to mark the holiday that 1 in 2.17 adults considers one of the nation's most important:

• Going to church is pretty

student loans;student debt

It's no stretch to say that student loans are the biggest crisis facing higher education right now. Rocketing tuition costs and a very tight job market have forced more students than ever-two-thirds-to borrow to pay for their education. And the amounts are staggering.

In all, Americans owe $527 billion in student loans. Put another way, if the federal government took every dollar it spent on Medicare last year and used it to pay off student loans instead, we'd still be $65 billion in the red.

Here are some quick facts:

• Average student debt rose nearly 25% between 2004 and 2008, to $23,200.
• Students borrowed $95 billion just to get them through 2008-09.
• 39% of Americans under 35 reported in 2006 that it will take them more than 10 years to pay off their loans-and those predictions have only gotten worse.
• 1 in 1.68 (60%) full-time, first-time undergrads at 4-year private non-profit colleges receive student loans in an academic year.

But if the

Why do so many parents love reading to their kids? Sure, it's a chance to quit chasing after their own Wild Things, Madelines, and Harry Potters, and just sit down for once. It's a nice way to share time. And it lets grownups revisit their own favorite childhood books.

But reading to children is also an important step in helping children learn to read for themselves. According to expert groups like Reading is Fundamental and the National Institute for Literacy, reading with children is one of the most important things parents can do to help kids become early readers and learn to love books.

Yet what do old-fashioned analog books mean to today's little digital darlings, who spend at least as much time looking at screens as at printed pages? At least two generations have blamed television for shortening kids' attention spans, and now the Internet offers even more compelling (and interactive) distractions.

There's some evidence that other media are leading kids away

Getty ImagesIs he cheating? Is she cheating? Tied to emotions of doubt, sadness, suspicion, and anger-at some point this question has crossed the mind of almost anyone who has ever been in love. Although it seems nearly universal to fear a partner will be unfaithful, how many people actually cheat?

In the United States, the odds a man who has ever been married or is living with someone has cheated during the relationship are 1 in 4.76 (21%). For perspective, these are the same as the odds that an adult in the United States never uses swear words in conversation (1 in 4.76). For women, the odds are 1 in 9.09 (11%), the same as the odds that a woman in the United States owns a firearm. Before drawing a solid line between the cheaters and the non-cheaters, it's interesting to note the gray area. Even a large number of people who aren't cheating are thinking about it. The odds are 1 in 3.33 that an adult in the United States who has not cheated during a relationship fantasizes about cheating.

spring break;binge drinking;sex

Lingering hangovers, deep sunburn, sexually transmitted infections, unplanned pregnancy, embarrassing memories of sexual misadventure-during spring break, not everything that happens in Cancún stays in Cancún.

That college students are likely to engage in risky behavior over spring break comes as no surprise. If anything, it's become a cultural expectation, popularized by movies, MTV, and who knows how many straight-to-DVD sexploitation video series. Expecting that college students will get rowdy, handsy, and drunk, some popular spring break locales often prepare ahead of time, dialing up their police presence in order to deal with the inrush of drunk-and-disorderly behavior. But what exactly are the spring break crowd's risky behaviors, and how likely are they?

The likeliest, and most available, is drinking. The odds a male college student spending spring break in Panama City Beach, Florida reports being drunk every single day during spring break are 1 in 2.47, about the

It used to be that when you said the words "gym," "workout," and especially "weight room," you could practically sniff the testosterone in the air. And the mental picture? Beads of masculine sweat dropping onto filthy mats and the kind of tight muscle tees that only people on HGH favor today.

That was then (the dark ages) and this is now. When it comes to specific fitness activities, today women frequently outnumber men. Women are more likely than men to engage in fitness activities for at least 100 days per year, and many of them are doing it at women's-only fitness clubs. And professionally, women continue to gain high-profile access to traditionally male sports, as when women's boxing was added to the 2012 Olympic Games this past August.

But before women claim victory, they have to take a breather. In a given day, men are more likely than women to participate in sports, exercise, or recreation. And-as every woman knows-life remains unfair. It's easier for men to see the

Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, Sinatra once famously crooned. But what about sex and marriage? Is there a reason it doesn't get a rhyme?

Popular opinion has it that as the years pass and the honeymoon fades, couples fall out of the habit of sex-and that what sex they do engage in becomes routine, even a chore, rather than an intimate and exciting act. It may be that sexual desires shift into something gentler, more platonic, as relationships progress, or that our biological clocks wind down as we grow older (however much those E.D. medication commercials may suggest otherwise). But it can become a problem when one partner wants more than the other does, or when both yearn for something in the bedroom but aren't talking about it.

Surveys suggest that most people do prefer marriage over the supposedly sexier single life. The odds an adult prefers wedlock are 1 in 1.33 (75%), as compared to 1 in 5.56 (18%) who prefer to be single and date and just 2%