Details, details.
You're right. "About 74%" implies that it falls between 73.5 and 74.5%.
"About 75% would (to me) imply that the value is somewhere between 70 and 80%.
Or, using the law of the WAG, 75% would imply a value somewhere between 50 and 100%.
“”About 74%” implies that it falls between 73.5 and 74.5%.”
Exactly, and (a) there’s no way they know that, and (b) that degree of precision would be irrelevant to a populist sciencey article anyway.
It’s just kind of crazy/dumb, in a subtle kind of way.
Or, “about 74%” would mean something around 74%, with a 1% margin of error so it could be anywhere between 73% and 75%, or depending on how the scientists like to round things, up to a 9% margin of error (if it was a 10% to 50% margin of error, you’d say 70% or 80%, if it’s above 50% you’ve got serious problems).
Also, given that the sample size was 3000 people, that means each person would account for 0.033% of the total, so knowing it to a value of less than 1% (which would be 30 people in this case) is not only possible, but quite feasible.