Uncle John’s Did You Know? (21 page)
Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
• Top Scrabble players know as many as 14,000 words—about seven times as many words in the average vocabulary—but they don’t necessarily know the meanings.
• There are 109 permissible two-letter words in American Scrabble, from AA (a kind of lava) to ZO (a kind of cattle).
• The highest recorded score in a game of Scrabble was 1,049, by Phil Appleby in 1989.
• The highest score in a single turn was 392; the word was CAZIQUES (native chiefs of the West Indies).
• There are 15 O’s in an Italian Scrabble set, but no J’s, K’s, W’s, X’s, or Y’s.
• In the English version of Scrabble, the letter Q is worth 10 points. In Portuguese, it’s worth 6.
• In the Finnish version of Scrabble, the letter D is worth 7 points, but it gets only 2 points in English.
THE SEVEN
NATURAL
WONDERS OF
THE WORLD
•
The Grand Canyon
was created by millions of years of wind and water erosion from the Colorado River. The rocks of the canyon walls range in age from 250 million years old at the top to more than 2 billion years old at the bottom.
•
Paricutín volcano
erupted out of a Mexican cornfield on February 20, 1943. Located just outside the city of Michoacán, about 200 miles west of Mexico City, Paricutín grew to 10,400 feet in just nine years, making it the fastest-growing volcano in recorded history. Its lava destroyed two villages and hundreds of homes, but caused no fatalities.
•
The harbor of Rio de Janeiro
, in what is now Brazil, was first seen by Portuguese explorers on January 1, 1502. The Portuguese thought they had reached the mouth of an immense river and named their find River of January—Rio de Janeiro. The spectacular harbor’s landmarks include Sugarloaf Mountain and Corcovado Peak.
•
The northern lights
, also called the aurora borealis,
occur when solar particles from the sun collide with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The energy created by the collision is emitted as photons (light particles). The many collisions produce an aurora—lights that seem to dance across the sky.
•
Victoria Falls
, the world’s largest waterfall, lies on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa, where the Zambezi River suddenly plummets 420 feet over a cliff. The first white man to see it, in 1855, was a Scottish missionary named David Livingstone. Although he named it after the Queen of England, native Africans continue to call it
Mosi-oa-Tunya
, which means The Smoke That Thunders, because the water makes thunderous clouds of spray as it falls.
•
The Himalayas
, the highest mountain range in the world, was created about 60 million years ago. India (at that time a separate continent) rapidly moved northward and collided with Asia, and the crash produced these amazing mountains. The famous Mt. Everest stands above the other peaks at 29,035 feet, making it the tallest mountain on the planet. Thousands of people have tried to climb it; more than 700 have succeeded, but at least 150 have died trying.
•
The Great Barrier Reef
, located in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, Australia, is the world’s largest coral reef. It is over 1,400 miles in length—so long that it can be seen from space. An estimated 1,500 species of fish and 350 types of coral live and grow on the Great Barrier Reef.
• The Chinese invented sunglasses in the 1400s. The first people to wear them were judges who were trying to conceal their expressions in court.
• The presidential mansion was originally gray. It wasn’t called the White House until it was painted white to cover the damage caused by the British in the War of 1812.
• Squanto, one of the first Native Americans the Pilgrims met in the New World, had lived in England for nine years. He’d been taken from his village by around 1605 and eventually made his way back home.
• The flag that Francis Scott Key was looking at off in the distance when he wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” was 30 feet high by 42 feet wide.
• It makes for a great story, but Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet. The first patent was awarded to Joseph Adamson in 1853.
• If you’d been born before the ninth century, you wouldn’t have had to study punctuation. There wasn’t any!
• Painted fingernails originated in China; the color indicated social rank.
• Spiders spin silk out of organs called “spinnerets.”
• Spiders can get trapped in their own webs if they trip or fall.
• The “dragline silk” that spiders use to get down from the ceiling to the floor is comparatively stronger than a steel rope.
• The idea of farming spiders for their silk doesn’t work very well because they tend to eat each other.
• Some spiders walk up walls by secreting sticky silk onto their feet. Others use microscopic hairs on their legs that slip into the wall’s nooks and crannies.
• The full name of the spider-heroine of
Charlotte’s Web
is Charlotte A. Cavatica, after the scientific name of the barn spider:
Araneus cavaticus
.
• The world’s biggest spider, the Goliath birdeater tarantula, hardly ever eats birds. It prefers rodents and frogs.
• Camel spiders are the world’s fastest: They’ve been clocked at close to 10 miles per hour.
• Genetic engineers have bred goats that have spider-silk genes inside them. Silk proteins can be harvested from the goats’ milk.
• Spiders aren’t insects—they’re
arachnids
. Unlike insects, they have no antennae and they have eight legs (insects have six legs).
• King Philip IV of Spain (1605–1665) is rumored to have smiled only three times in his life.
• Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) owned 150 wigs and 2,000 pairs of gloves. She wore a necklace with a perfume bottle attached—probably because the people around her smelled bad. (Elizabethans believed that taking baths could make you sick.)
• In 2005, Swaziland’s King Mswati III bought 10 new BMWs for his wives.
• Number of serfs that Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (1729–1796) gave away as gifts: 45,000.
• Ethelred the Unready became king of England in 968 A.D., at the age of 10. He was called “Unready” because he had trouble making decisions.
• Eighteen French kings have been named Louis. Louis IX became a saint; Louis XVI died on the guillotine.
• When Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang died in 210 B.C., more than 8,000 life-size statues were buried in his grave with him.
• King Charles VIII of France (1470–1498) had six toes on one foot.
• In the United States, there are about five million more women than men.
• The average woman walks at a pace of 274 feet per minute. The average man walks faster, but not by much: He moves at 275 feet per minute.
• In 1950 only 2% of the members of the armed forces was female. As of 2004—54 years later—the number was up to 15%.
• Women have more sweat glands than men, but men’s sweat glands are more active (they sweat more).
• Men talk on their wireless phones more than women, but women use their camera phones more than men.
• Women are more likely to have gardened in the last 12 months: More than half of all women got dirt under their fingernails. Only a third of all men did.
• Who reads more? Women. Last year 55% of women opened a book, while only 38% of men did.
• Is this fair? In 2003, females aged 15 and older working full-time all year earned 76¢ for every $1 their male counterparts earned. In 2004, that was up to a whopping…77¢.
• Old news from the Middle East: Damascus, Syria, was a flourishing city a few thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 B.C., which makes it the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.
• The name Canada is from a Huron-Iroquoian word meaning “village” or “settlement.”
• The country with the smallest population: Pitcairn Island in Polynesia, with 67 residents.
• Only 20 of Ohio’s 2,500 lakes are natural—all the rest are man-made.
• Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.
• The northernmost point in the United States is Point Barrow, Alaska; the southernmost point is more than 3,600 miles away in Ka Lae, Hawaii.
• There are no arid deserts in Europe.
• Amatignak Island, Alaska, is the westernmost point in the United States. Believe it or not, 70 miles
west
of that is the
easternmost
point: Pochnoi Point on Semisopochnoi Island, Alaska. (It’s on the other side of the international date line, where the eastern hemisphere begins.)
• Pop quiz: Is Australia an island or a continent? Answer: Scientists are still arguing about it.
• Only 22% of people say they would sacrifice themselves to save their husband or wife. But 85% say they would risk their life to save their pet.
• Babies who live with cats and dogs tend to develop fewer allergies.
• According to a survey of pet owners, 21% of dogs and 7% of cats snore.
• Nine out of 10 pet owners think of their pets as members of the family.
• Iguanas recognize their human owners and greet them differently than they greet strangers.
• A family paid Texas A&M University $2,300,000 to clone their pet Collie, Missy.
• If you want to move to Hawaii, your cat or dog might have to be kept in quarantine there for as long four months. If your dog is part wolf, forget about him moving there at all.
• It’s official: After studying thousands of papers on the subject, the National Academy of Sciences has declared that too many pets are overweight.
• 10% of women who own cats say they have ended a relationship because their partner didn’t like their cat.
• Among the names the early Congress considered for their newly independent country were: United States of Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, and Freedonia.