Book Four : Chapter Four
Factual
ODDITIES
A 198 metre (650 ft) salt mine beneath the Kansas prairies is
used as a bomb-proof and quake-proof storage vault for such
things as:
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| According to a Newsweek survey, 80 per cent of Chinese college students are virgins. |
Even though recent horror stories remind us that the population of the
planet has doubled in less than 30 years and will top 6 billion by 2000,
another report reveals that the world's population growth is actually
slowing, and that it could flatten out at 8 billion by 2025.
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| A rainbow can occur only when the sun is 40 degrees or less above the horizon. |
There are more than 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee. Of these,
only 26 have been tested, and half caused cancer in rats.
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| The average ice berg weighs 20,000,000 tons. |
The 1995 Guiness Book of World Records lists the largest
pizza on record as 37.4 meters in diameter (12,159 sq.ft.).
It was baked in Norwood, South Africa on December 8th 1990.
Another notable pizza by size was a 10,000 sq.ft. pizza cooked by Lorenzo Amato, owner of Cafe di Lorenzo in Tallahassee Florida in 1991. There are no public records on what became of either dish. |
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When you eat meat and drink milk in the same meal, your body
does not absorb any of the milk's calcium. It is best to have
2 hours between the milk and the meat. (Meat from animals,
not peanuts or eggs.)
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| Plastic flamingos outnumber live flamingos in the United States. |
A hard-working adult will normally sweat as much as 18 litres (4 gallons)
each day. Most of the sweat will evaporate before a person realises it's
there.
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| You are more likely to be bitten by a mosquito if you've eaten a banana. |
An ingot of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet
the size of a tennis court.
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| It takes more than twice as many facial muscles to smile as it does to frown. |
TYPEWRITER is the longest word in the english language that can be
written using only the letters on one row of a standard qwerty (typewriter)
keyboard.
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| 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 |
Had a close look at statues lately? It seems there are
hidden meanings in just about every aspect of portrait
statues.
If a statue of a person on a horse has both of the horse's front legs in the air, then the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes. |
| There are no words in the english language to rhyme with month, orange, silver, or purple. |
An ancient tradition amongst clans of the British Isles
is the root of the phrase 'to get fired'.
When the clans wanted to get rid of someone without killing them, they would burn down their house (or hut). |
| 'Canada' is an Native American word meaning "Big Village". |
Only two people signed the American Declaration of Independence on July 4th - John
Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the
last signature wasn't added until five years later.
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| The most common name in the world is Mohammed. |
Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden.
The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic
stopped as people switched sides. The time and day were chosen to prevent
accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too
sleepy to realize that this was the day of the changeover.
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| The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672. |
More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.
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| Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots. |
Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them
looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
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| A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second. A 'moment' is an Olde English unit of time equal to 90 seconds. |
At age ninety, Peter Mustafic of Botovo, Yugoslavia, suddenly
began speaking again after a silence of 40 years. The Yugoslavian
news agency quoted him as saying, "I just didn't want to do
military service, so I stopped speaking in 1920; then I got
used to it."
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| The average person falls asleep in seven minutes. |
The world's youngest recorded parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
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| The youngest pope was 11 years old. |
Jupiter is bigger than all the other planets in our solar system combined.
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| Proportional to their weight, adult men are stronger than horses. |
Trust the Japanese to be so practical. They have square
watermelons ... they stack better.
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| The pilgrims ate popcorn at the first Thanksgiving dinner. |
Iceland consumes more Coca-cola per capita than any other nation.
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| Your nose and ears never stop growing. |
In 1968, a convention of beggars in Dacca, India, passed a resolution
demanding that "the minimum amount of alms be fixed at 15 paisa (three
cents)." The convention also demanded that the interval between when
a person hears a knock at his front door and when he offers alms should
not exceed 45 seconds.
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| Cream does not weigh as much as milk. |
The first novel to be written on a typewriter was 'Tom Sawyer',
by Mark Twain.
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| It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs. |
More collect calls are placed on Father's Day than any other day of the year.
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| Men get hiccups more often than women. |
Because of the rotation of the earth, an object can be
thrown farther if it is thrown west.
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| Hot water is heavier than cold. |
In the United States, a pound of potato chips costs
two hundred times more than a pound of potatoes.
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| Caesar salad has nothing to do with any of the Caesars. It was first concocted in a bar in Tiajuana, Mexico, in the 1920's. |
Experiments conducted in Germany and at the University
of Southampton in England show that even mild and incidental
noises cause the pupils of the eyes to dilate.
The researchers believe that this is why surgeons, watchmakers, and others who perform delicate manual operations are so bothered by noise. The sounds cause their pupils to change focus and blur their vision. |
| Your average human being will lose between 40 and 100 strands of hair every day.› |
Half the foods eaten throughout the world today were developed
by farmers in the Andes Mountains. Potatoes, maize, sweet
potatoes, squash, all varieties of beans, peanuts, papayas,
strawberries, mulberries and many other foods were first grown
in this region.
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A person cannot taste food unless it is mixed with saliva.
If a strong-tasting substance like salt is placed on a dry tongue, the taste buds will not be able to taste it. However, as soon as a drop of saliva is added and the salt is dissolved a definite taste sensation results. This is true for all foods. Try it! | |
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