[MrRubix]

Decided to check Wiki:

"By the end of the 2008 climbing season, there had been 4,102 ascents to the summit by about 2,700 individuals"

And from a few sites found via Google, it would seem as if there have been a total of 200 deaths or so.

From Extreme Science, they say about 6,000 people have even attempted to TRY Mt. Everest.



From that alone, 2,700/6,000 = 45% of the people who attempt Everest actually make it. This might seem fairly high, but consider the fact that you probably wouldn't even try to climb Everest in the first place unless you felt you had a reasonable shot (your life is on the line, after all), considering that you'd have to know what you were doing/be in proper physical shape/etc, so it's probably a somewhat self-selective pool.

200/2700 = 7.5% of those people died (the real number is probably a lot lower than this, because I would assume 200 includes TOTAL deaths and I assume there are more deaths on the way up than on the way down, so the real statistic should probably be < 3.75%-4% or so, which is actually not too far off from the 1/20 -> 5% statistic the commercial gave.






tldr: A 1 in 2 million frequency quote is not a very good way to describe the success rate of reaching the top of Everest.


EDIT: One thing I do find funny is that despite the fact they decided to basically use the world's population as the denominator in many of their calculations (which is retarded because a success rate should be number of successes/(number of successes + number of failures)), they decided to crunch down the denominator for the death statistic. I guess they decided that the chances of dying on the back from Mt. Everest is 200/7 billion = 1:35 million were obviously too low but didn't bother to consider this logic for any other of their stats, lmao.