6 Minute English / Are opinion polls accurate?

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Neil Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Sam. Predicting the future is not easy but that s exactly the job of opinion pollsters researchers who ask people questions to discover what they think about certain topics. Often their aim is predicting which political party will win in election by asking members of the public how they intend to vote.

But predicting the future is never one hundred percent accurate, and opinion polls don t always get it right. In 2016, few pollsters predicted a victory for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election.

And in the 2020 US elections, most polls predicted Trump would lose to Joe Biden by a much larger amount than he actually did. These mistakes, sometimes called misfires -when things do not work in the way intended - have damaged the reputation of opinion pollsters. In this programme we ll be taking a look into the opinion polling industry and, of course, learning some useful new vocabulary as well.

But first I have a question for you, Sam, and it s about another time when the opinion polls got it wrong. Few pollsters predicted that Britain would vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum which, in the end, it did. But what was the final split between those who voted to leave and those who wanted to remain? Was it:

a) 51 leave to 49 remain?

b) 52 leave to 48 remain?

c) 52 remain to 48 leave?

I think it was b) 52 percent voted to leave and 48 percent to remain.