From Time.com: Shark Frenzy in Solana Beach
Humans are a far greater threat to sharks than they are to us. But, thanks to movies and the Discover Channel, we can all close our eyes and imagine what it might be like to get attacked by a shark!
The media was fascinated because shark attacks are sickeningly grisly and cosmically rare. Your chances of being killed by a shark in any given year are about 1 in 280 million, according to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Your chances of dying in a car accident are about 1 in 6,700. In other words, you would have to swim in the ocean 41,000 times a year (or 112 times a day, or seven times every waking hour) before swimming in shark habitats became as dangerous as driving your car a single time. As my colleague Amanda Ripley points out in her forthcoming book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes -- and Why, humans are kicking ass in the shark-human war: we kill at least 26 million of them every year, and they kill about six of us.
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