101.3 million sheep

live in Australia. Not NZ - there's "only" 39.2 million in NZ apparently. So, roughly 5 sheep per person in Australia, 10 per person in NZ.

Still not as many sheep as in China though: they have 157.9 million of them.

Source

Romney

is apparently the most popular sheep breed in NZ. It's got coarse wool, useful for things like making carpets. There's about 25 million of them around NZ...

(apperently there's only about 2 million Merino in the country... kind of surprising to me!)

Source

(Due to request, we'll have a week of agricultural stats... you asked for it, Mel :) )

13.7 degrees Celsius

Is Hamilton's annual average temperature. In other words, average over the entire year.

For comparison, Brisbane's average is 20.5C, Cape Town's is 16.8C, Cairns is 24.5C and Dunedin is 10.5C.

Source and NIWA

(Do I have a fascination with weather? And I'm not even English...)

18,442mm of rain

Is the record for the wettest year anywhere in NZ. Where? West Coast of the South Island, of course! Hokitika to be precise. You wouldn't have wanted to be there in 1997-98.

Source

614 cubic metres per second

Is how much water flows out of the Clutha River in Otago, on average. It's the biggest river in NZ by annual discharge... I can't actually find a comparable figure for the Waikato River, but I imagine it's reasonably close.

For comparison, the "mighty" Murray River in Aus averages 767 cubic metres per second, but drains a slightly larger area of around 1 million km2 (as opposed to the Clutha's ~22 thousand km2!).

15% tax on wine

That's the alcohol excise rate here in NZ. It's 25% in Australia, hence why grog's a little cheaper over here...

Source

NZ$116000 for a Camry?

Yep, that's how much you have to pay. If you live in Singapore that is. There's a 40% duty, along with a 150% tax, along with tens of thousands of dollars for a Certificate of Entitlement, etc.

Summary: if you ever want to buy a car in Singapore, forget it.

Price from here.

9 hours, 32 minutes.

That's how much daylight we get today - on the winter solstice. It's actually only one of a few days of very similar length (i.e. within a minute of each other). Sunrise is at 07h34, sunset at 17h06.
For comparison, Brisbane gets 10 hours, 24 minutes of daylight today.
Just as well we're not in Invercargill - they only get 8 hours, 40 minutes of daylight today!

55% of cars in NZ

are second-hand imports, the vast majority of which come from Japan. Well, that was the proportion of cars registered in 2008 that were second-hand imports anyway. That figure has been coming down over the last few years (It reached a peak of 60% in 1999).
Source
Some background: As of the late 1990's, there's been no vehicle manufacture or assembly in NZ, along with no import tariffs. That means that second-hand cars from Japan are very cheap - and being generally only around 5 years old are attractive options for most people. So, NZ ends up with relatively few new cars, but also relatively few really old cars (because 5 year-old imports are so cheap).

38,295 people

attend each AFL match, on average. That's an awful lot. Comparative figure for rugby league: 16979.

Source

63 Days...

is the average number of days of ground frost that Hamilton gets each year. I'm assuming that doesn't mean the air temperature necessarily drops below zero.

NIWA tells me so.

70% of NZ's electricity...

Comes from renewable sources.

14 degrees Celsius

Is Hamilton's average maximum temperature for the month of June.
Compare that with Brisbane's average maximum of 20.9C! Yes it might get cold at night in Brisbane, but it almost always warms up...

1% of people in China...

live in Shanghai. Roughly anyway. That's really not a large proportion of the population in the largest city. Compare that with some other countries:
- New Zealand: (30% live in Auckland)
- Australia: (20% live in Sydney)

Or even large countries:
- USA: (5.8% live in New York City)
- Japan: (10% live in Tokyo)

10 000 000 000 songs

That's how many songs were downloaded from the iTunes store by 24th February 2010. It's probably a billion or two more by now. Give or take.

599,000 hectares

The size of Australia's largest sheep station, which is in SW Queensland apparently.

Just how big is that? Slightly bigger than the entire nation of Brunei, as it turns out.

23% of men in NZ...

...have had a vasectomy. Apparently it's the highest rate in the world...
Source

(In honour of NZ's PM, John Key)

Welcome...

As the saying goes, "there's lies, and statistics". But they certainly can tell a picture. And for someone like me, who has an inquiring mind (or a twisted engineer's brain, you might say), statistics are fascinating. So, this is a place to post random tidbits of pure trivia that I happen to have come across, and found interesting.
Or sought out, just because I was wondering.
I'll see how often this gets updated - the goal is once a day, but I'll see about that!