Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (16 page)

Adelaide Miethke worked for the service, and she began to wonder why the government couldn’t use the same technology to set up schools for kids living on the ranches. It took a few tries, but she presented a plan to the government, and in 1950, the first school opened in a town called Alice Springs. It was called the School of the Air.

HOW IT WORKED

Each teacher for the school had a small office in one of the Outback towns. The students sat in their own houses hundreds of miles away next to their radios. In the school’s early days, the teacher just presented a 3½-hour lesson and the kids listened—they had no way to talk to her. But eventually, the school got two-way radios and the kids could talk to the teacher and to each other.

At least once a year, teachers went on “patrol.” That meant they drove to each child’s home (no matter how far away it was) to meet the kids face-to-face and talk to their parents. The rest of the year, airplanes for the Royal Flying Doctor Service delivered mail, homework, and supplies to teachers and students.

No one’s sure: Wilma Flintstone’s maiden name was either Pebble or Slaghoopal.

OUTBACK SCHOOL TODAY

Alice Springs was just the first School of the Air. In all, 15 schools opened throughout the Australian Outback. Today, they’re a little different but serve basically the same needs. Kids stopped using radios in 2005, and they no longer send in their homework by airplane. Now they use e-mail and Web cams to communicate with their teachers. But teachers still do “patrol” visits, and today, about 1,000 students are enrolled in the program. Without the Schools of the Air, those kids would have to leave their families to get an education, or they might not be able to go to school at all.

Label on a Korean kitchen knife: “Warning: keep out of children.”

A lot of the things you may have been told just aren’t true.

Myth:
Monkeys and apes groom each other by picking off fleas and ticks, and then they eat them.

Truth:
They’re not removing bugs, they’re removing dead skin. (But they do eat it.)

Myth:
Ninjas wore all black.

Truth:
When movies and TV shows started showing ninjas—secret agents in old Japan—they borrowed the details from 19th-century Japanese plays, which put ninjas in black clothing because it looked mysterious and dramatic onstage. In reality, ninjas wore dark blue at night to fade into the dark. During the day, they wore whatever clothes they needed to blend in with crowds.

Myth:
Diamonds are the world’s most valuable gems.

Truth:
Carat for carat (the measurement used to weigh gems), rubies are more valuable than diamonds.

Myth:
An arm or limb “falls asleep” because its blood supply gets cut off.

Truth:
The feeling of numbness happens when a major nerve is pinched against a hard object or bone. The pinch causes a temporary numb sensation, but the blood continues to flow normally.

Popular snack in Uganda:
Nsenene
—green grasshoppers fried in oil, with salt.

Myth:
The Eskimo language has hundreds of different words for “snow.”

Truth:
There is no single group of people called “Eskimos,” so there is no one “Eskimo language.” The term refers to dozens of different ethnic groups in northern North America, most of whom speak their own language. Each has its own word for “snow.”

Myth:
Chameleons change color to blend into their environment.

Truth:
Chameleons can change color, but it’s a reaction to fear, extreme temperature, or light changes. And different chameleons turn different colors; it does help them survive. But the change has nothing to do with matching their surroundings.

Myth:
In the original fairy tale, Cinderella’s slippers were made of glass.

Truth:
Actually, they were made of fur. The goof comes from a poor translation—someone interpreted the French word
vair
, which means “fox fur,” as
verre
, which means “glass.”

Big Beefhead, the Buffalo Hangman, His Accidency, and Uncle Jumbo were some of the nicknames given to President Grover Cleveland.

Everything you ever needed to know about sweat.

•
People sweat to cool themselves off. As the sweat evaporates from your skin, it lowers your body’s temperature.

•
On a hot summer day, most people sweat about three cups per hour.

•
Ninety-nine percent of sweat is water; the rest is mostly potassium and salt

•
Who sweats more—Olympic athletes or football players? Probably the Olympians, especially if they’re playing a sport that requires constant activity, like tennis or soccer. Competitors in men’s tennis produce about 14 cups of sweat per match. That beats the football players—even on a very hot day, they usually sweat less than five cups per game.

•
Sweat stinks, right? Nope. It’s odorless. The bacteria that thrive in it are what smell.

•
The human body contains as many as 4 million sweat glands. Your feet have the most, and your back has the least.

•
Women have more sweat glands than men, but men’s glands are more active, which is why it often seems like men sweat more than women.

•
Despite what many people think, dogs do have sweat glands, mostly on their paws. But they have far fewer than humans, so they also pant to cool themselves off.

•
Two things cause your body to sweat: high heat and stress. Why? Stress makes your body think it’s under attack, so it produces a chemical called adrenaline to give you extra strength to fight back or run away. All that activity would raise your body’s temperature, so you sweat in anticipation of it. That worked well for our ancestors, who had to fight off wild animals and other real attacks. But in modern times, sweating is just a leftover evolutionary reaction…that usually stresses people out even more.

Southernmost capital on earth: Wellington, New Zealand

For these guys, crime really didn’t pay.

B
UMP Oops:

In January 2009, 20-year-old Santiago Alonso was driving down a Massachusetts street when he hit another car. Frightened that he’d get in trouble, he immediately drove away. The problem? His car’s bumper had fallen off during the accident. Just a bumper wouldn’t have been so bad…but it also had the car’s license plate attached to it.

Gotcha!
The police easily tracked Alonso down and arrested him for making an unsafe lane change and for fleeing the scene of an accident.

NO KIDDING

Oops:
When Barry Kramer decided to rob a sporting-goods store in Utah in November 2008, he realized he needed a weapon and a disguise. What did he choose? A 10-inch butcher knife and a pair of men’s underwear. He walked into the store with the underwear on his head and demanded that the clerk give him all the cash in the register. According to police reports, the clerk first said, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” and then tried to wrestle the knife away from Kramer. The blade broke, so Kramer ran.

Gotcha!
Outside the store, two customers tackled Kramer and sat on him until the police arrived.

It’s against the law to take photos of British police officers.

These amazing young athletes took to the field against some of the world’s best…and won
!

F
REDDY ADU

This future soccer star immigrated to the United States from the African nation of Ghana in 1997, when he was eight. By then, Freddy had already been playing soccer for more than five years and was used to going up against much older players in his hometown. So when a coach in his Maryland neighborhood saw him play and asked him to join a team of boys a few years older than he was, Freddy signed up right away.

In 2003, Freddy became an American citizen, and the next year, a few months before he turned 15, he made his professional debut as a forward and midfielder for the D.C. United. He played with and scored goals against men several years older, and he was the youngest American athlete to join a professional team in more than 100 years. Freddy was also a star student: he got his high-school diploma when he was 15 years old, just a few months after becoming a Major League soccer player.

Ever have blueberry wojapi? It’s a kind of Sioux fruit pudding.

MARIA SHARAPOVA

In 1991, at the age of four, Maria started playing tennis in her hometown of Nyagan, Russia. By six, she was so good that she’d impressed the head coach of the Russian Tennis Federation. By seven, she’d moved to the United States to train at the Bollettieri Sports Academy in Bradenton, Florida, a school that had produced tennis stars like Andre Agassi and Monica Seles. At first, her father had to work several jobs to pay for her training. But just a few months after she got to Florida, Maria was such a tennis talent that she won a full scholarship to the academy.