Chosen: One of my cousins is an illiterate adult and its shocking how much not being able to read can affect a person’s self esteem and will power. This personal experience coupled with the fact that 64% are females showing that perhaps women aren’t even given the opportunity to learn to read makes this a powerful statistic.
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics
Submitted By: David Janove
Stan's Cafe Stat Centre 
Thanks very much for this David. I like your reasoning very much. That number is way too big for us to use in the version of the show we are currently running at the Skirball, it would use almost all our rice, but your contribution promoted me to try and find a figure for the USA. What a world of pain/fascination that turned out to be. Obviously there are various ways of grading illiteracy and the best I could find from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy was a figure of 7,000,000 who couldn’t answer simple test questions an additional 4,000,000 for whom language barriers prevented them from actually taking the test. Presumably a proportion of these could be highly literate in languages other than English.Then there is the whole link between illiteracy and the prison population…Thanks for that great can of worms,we’ll keep at it.