What is life expectancy?

Life Expectancy

Life expectancy is the expected (in the statistical sense) number of years of life remaining at a given age. It is denoted by ex, which means the average number of subsequent years of life for someone now aged x, according to a particular mortality experience. (In technical literature, this symbol means the average number of complete years of life remaining, excluding fractions of a year. The corresponding statistic including fractions of a year, the normal meaning of life expectancy, has a symbol with a small circle over the e.) In the modern era, life expectancy has increased so dramatically as to call into question the ability to use current data for very long range predictions into the future.

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Famous quotes containing the words life and/or expectancy:

    The melancholy of having to count souls
    Where they grow fewer and fewer every year
    Is extreme where they shrink to none at all.
    It must be I want life to go on living.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
    The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s,eye, tongue, sword,
    Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,
    The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
    Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)