Читать книгу The Mammoth Book of Useless Information - Noel Botham - Страница 7

• Twenty-five per cent of women think money makes a man sexier.

• Pablo Picasso was born dead. His midwife abandoned him on a table, leaving Picasso’s uncle to bring him to life with a lungful of cigar smoke.

• Tchaikovsky was financed by a wealthy widow for thirteen years. At her request, they never met.

• The great lover and adventurer Casanova was earning his living as a librarian for a count in Bohemia when he died at the age of 73.

• Today, 6.7 billion people live on the Earth.

• The first person other than royalty to be portrayed on a British stamp was William Shakespeare, in 1964.

• Offered a new pen to write with, 97 per cent of all people will write their own name.

• There are 106 boys born for every 100 girls.

• When Errol Flynn appeared as a contestant on the mid-1950s TV quiz show The Big Surprise, he was questioned about sailing and won $30,000.

• The world’s population grows by 100 million each year.

• In all, 950 million people in the world are malnourished.

• Actor Montgomery Clift is said to haunt room number 928 of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, which was home to him for three months while filming From Here to Eternity (1953). Hotel guests and employees have reported sensing the actor’s presence, or have heard him reciting his lines and playing the trumpet. One guest felt a hand patting her shoulder, while others claim to feel cold spots in the room.

• After Frank Lahainer died in March 1995, in Palm Beach, Florida, his widow Gianna had him embalmed and stored for forty days at a funeral home. It seemed that Frank, worth $300 million, died at an inconvenient time: it was the middle of Palm Beach’s social season and Gianna didn’t want to miss any of the parties.

• Nuns in the United States have an average life expectancy of seventy-seven years, the longest of any group in the country.

• The men who served as guards along the Great Wall of China in the Middle Ages were often born on the wall, grew up there, married there, died there and were buried within it. Many of these guards never left the wall in their entire lives.

• St George, the patron saint of England, never actually visited England.

• To help create her signature sexy walk, actress Marilyn Monroe sawed off part of the heel of one shoe.

• After his death, the body of Pope Formosus was dug up and tried for various crimes.

• As the official taste-tester for Edy’s Grand Ice Cream, John Harrison had his taste buds insured for $1 million.

• Prompted by their immense public appeal, Ancient Roman gladiators performed product endorsements.

• Cleopatra was part Macedonian, part Greek and part Iranian. She was not an Egyptian.

• There are currently six reigning queens in Europe. They are: Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom; Queen Sofia of Spain; Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands; Queen Margrethe II of Denmark; Queen Silvia of Sweden; and Queen Fabiola of Belgium.

• A man hit by a car in New York in 1977 got up uninjured, but lay back down in front of the car when a bystander told him to pretend he was hurt so he could collect insurance money. The car rolled forward and crushed him to death.

• Julius Caesar, Martin Luther King and Jonathan Swift all suffered from Ménière’s disease. It is a disorder of the hearing and balance senses, causing progressive deafness and attacks of tinnitus and vertigo.

• King Mithridates VI was so afraid of assassination by poisoning that he gave himself small doses of poison each day in the hope that he would naturally build up a resistance to poisons. When the Romans invaded in 63 BC, to avoid being captured he tried to commit suicide, but he had built up such an immunity that the poison he took had no effect on him. Eventually the king ordered a slave to kill him with his sword.

• Johann Sebastian Bach once walked 230 miles (370km) to hear the organist at Lübeck in Germany.

• Adolf Hitler was fascinated by hands. In his library there was a well-thumbed book containing pictures and drawings of hands belonging to famous people throughout history. He particularly liked to show his guests how closely his own hands resembled those of Frederick the Great, one of his heroes.

• Handel wrote the score of his Messiah in just over three weeks.

• US actor Larry Hagman didn’t allow smoking on the set of TV series Dallas.

• St John was the only one of the twelve apostles to die a natural death.

• The pioneering scientist Marie Curie was not allowed to become a member of the prestigious French Academy because she was a woman.

• In 1994, Los Angeles police arrested a man for dressing as the Grim Reaper – complete with scythe – and standing outside the windows of old people’s homes, staring in.

• The composer Richard Wagner was vegetarian, and once published a diatribe against ‘the abominable practice of flesh eating’.

• Nazi Adolf Eichmann was originally a travelling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company of Austria.

• During the 17th century, the Sultan of Turkey ordered that his entire harem of women be drowned and replaced with a new one.

• Henry VII was the only British king to be crowned on the field of battle.

• Ludwig van Beethoven was once arrested for vagrancy.

• In 1759, Emmanuel Swedenborg, speaking to a reception full of local notables in Gothenburg, described in vivid detail the progress of a disastrous fire that was sweeping through Stockholm, 300 miles (483km) away. At six o’clock he told them the fire had just broken out; at eight he told them it had been extinguished only three doors from his home. Two days later, a messenger from Stockholm confirmed every detail.

• When Richard II died, in 1400, a hole was left in the side of his tomb so that people could touch his royal head. However, 376 years later, a schoolboy reportedly took advantage of this and stole his jawbone.

• Julius Caesar wore a laurel wreath to cover the onset of baldness.

• Blackbird, Chief of the Omaha Indians, was buried sitting on his favourite horse.

• Prime Minister William Gladstone, a man of strong Puritan impulses, kept a selection of whips in his cellar with which he regularly chastised himself.

• Irving Berlin composed 3,000 songs in his lifetime but couldn’t read music.

• China uses 45 billion chopsticks per year, using 25 million trees to make them.

• President Kaunda of Zambia once threatened to resign if his fellow countrymen didn’t stop drinking so much alcohol.

• The Winchester Mansion, in San José, California, was built by Sara Winchester, the widow of gun manufacturer William Winchester. She had been told by a psychic to build a house large enough to house the souls of all those who had been killed by Winchester guns. With stairways and doors that go nowhere, secret rooms and passages, and elevators that only go up one floor, some believe that Sara had the house built in a confusing way so that the spirits wouldn’t be able to find her and seek revenge. Obsessed with the number thirteen, every night at the stroke of midnight she would sit down to dinner at a table set for thirteen people, even though she was alone. The house also had thirteen bathrooms, stairways with thirteen steps and so on. Her superstitions meant that she would never give her workmen the day off, afraid that the day she stopped building she would die. One day, however, after many complaints, she finally gave her staff a day off – and that is the day she died.

• It is believed that Handel haunts his former London home. Many who have entered Handel’s bedroom, where he died in 1759, have reported seeing a tall, dark shape and sensing a strong smell of perfume. Roman Catholic priests have performed exorcisms in their bid to clear the house of all spirits before it becomes a museum that will be open to the public.

• There are more than 150 million sheep in Australia but only 17 million people, while in New Zealand there are only 4 million people compared with 70 million sheep.

• In Holland, you can be fined for not using a shopping basket at a grocery store.

• On every continent there is a city called Rome.

• The oldest inhabited city is Damascus, Syria.

• The first city in the world to have a population of more than 1 million was London, which today is the thirteenth most populated city.

• The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific Ocean.

• Kilts are not native to Scotland. They originated in France.

• One-third of Taiwanese funeral processions include a stripper.

• It is illegal to own a red car in Shanghai, China.

• Antarctica is the only land on our planet that is not owned by any country.

• There is now a cash machine at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which has a winter population of 200 people. It is the only ATM machine on the continent.

• Major earthquakes have hit Japan on 1 September AD 827, 1 September AD 859, 1 September 1185, 1 September 1649 and 1 September 1923.

• There are ninety-two known cases of nuclear bombs lost at sea.

• In Nepal, cow dung is used for medicinal purposes.

• All the Earth’s continents, except Antarctica, are wider at the north than at the south.

• There are no rental cars in Bermuda.

• The richest country in the world is Switzerland, while Mozambique is the poorest.

• Until 1920, Canada was planning on invading the United States.

• In 1956, only 8 per cent of British households had a refrigerator.

• In India, people are legally allowed to marry a dog.

• The Ancient Egyptians trained baboons to wait on tables.

• One day in 1892, residents of Paderborn, Germany, witnessed the appearance of an odd-looking yellow cloud. Out of it fell not only a fierce rain, but also mussels.

• Mount Everest is 1ft (30.5cm) higher today than it was a century ago, and is believed to be still growing.

• Greenland has more ice on it than Iceland does, while Iceland has more grass and trees than Greenland.

• The country of Tanzania has an island called Mafia.

• Panama is the only place in the world where someone can see the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean and set over the Atlantic.

• In Poland, a brewery developed a plumbing problem in which beer was accidentally pumped into the incoming water supply. It meant that residents of the town got free beer on tap for one day.

• The Kingdom of Tonga, in the South Pacific, once issued a stamp shaped like a banana.

• Japanese children can buy a toy in the shape of a small plastic atom bomb.

• Mount Athos, in northern Greece, calls itself an independent country and has a male-only population of about 4,000. No females of any kind, including animals, are allowed. There are twenty monasteries within a space of 20 miles (32km).

• In Cyprus, there is one cinema per every eight people.

• Two hundred and thirty people died when Moradabad, India, was bombed with giant balls of hail more than 2in (5cm) in diameter on 30 April 1888.

• A church steeple in Germany was struck by lightning and destroyed on 18 April 1599. The members of the church rebuilt it, but it was hit by lightning three more times between then and 1783, and rebuilt again and again. Every time it was hit, the date was 18 April.

• Monaco issued a postage stamp honouring Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the picture on the stamp showed six fingers on his left hand.

• The most common place name in Britain is Newton, which occurs 150 times.

• China has more English speakers than the United States.

• The Toltecs, 7th-century native Mexicans, went into battle with wooden swords so as not to kill their enemies.

• In 1821, stones fell on a house in Truro, Cornwall. So remarkable was the event that the local mayor visited the house, though he was unnerved by the rattling of the walls and roof due to the falling stones. Called in to help, the military was unable to determine the source of the stones, and five days later the fall was still going on.

• Belgium is the only country that has never imposed censorship laws on adult films.

• Freelance Dutch prostitutes have to charge sales tax, but can write off items such as condoms and beds.

• The average court fine for drunk driving in Denmark is one month’s salary if convicted.

• People in Sweden, Japan and Canada are more likely to know the population of the United States than Americans.

• About 10 per cent of the workforce in Egypt is under 12 years of age.

• The Netherlands is credited with having the most bikes in the world. One bike per person is the national average, with an estimated 16 million bicycles nationwide.

• On a summer’s evening in Edinburgh, 1849, there was a loud clap of thunder, after which a large and irregularly shaped mass of ice, estimated to be around 20ft (6m) in circumference, crashed to the ground near a farmhouse.

• The average worker in Japan reportedly takes only half of his or her earned holiday time each year.

• The Amazon’s flow is twelve times that of the Mississippi. The South American river disgorges as much water in a day as the Thames carries past London in a year.

• Georgia is the world’s top pecan producer.

• People in Siberia often buy milk frozen on a stick.

• The population of Colombia doubles every twenty-two years.

• Sweden is the biggest user of ketchup, spending £2.25 per person a year on it. Australia is the second highest user, spending £1.35 a year, and the United States and Canada are joint third, spending £1.22 a year. The ketchup expenditure of other countries per person is as follows: Germany £0.95, United Kingdom £0.90, Poland and Japan £0.77, France £0.65 and Russia £0.50

• Eighty per cent of the Australian population live in the cities along the coast.

• The most common name for a pub in Britain is ‘The Red Lion’.

• Among the shortest people in the world are the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo River basin, where the men reach an average of 4ft 6in (1.36m) tall.

• In Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for most trips of less than fifty minutes.

• The world’s longest escalator is in Ocean Park, Hong Kong. With a length of 745ft (227m), the escalator boasts a vertical rise of 377ft (115m).

• There is 1 mile (1.6km) of railroad track in Belgium for every 1.5 miles² (3.8km²) of land.

• Fifty per cent of the adult Dutch population has never flown in a plane, and 28 per cent admits a fear of flying.

• The tallest sand dunes in the world are in the Sahara desert. The dunes have enough sand in them to bury the Great Pyramids of Egypt and the Eiffel Tower.

• Asia has the greatest number of working children, totalling 45 million. Africa is second, with 24 million.

• On some Pacific islands, shark teeth are used to make skin tattoos.

• The most-visited cemetery in the world is Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, in Paris. Established in 1805, it contains the tombs of over 1 million people, including: composer Chopin; singer Edith Piaf; writers Oscar Wilde, Molière, Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein; artists David, Delacroix, Pissarro, Seurat and Modigliani; actors Sarah Bernhardt, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand; and dancer Isadora Duncan. The most-visited tomb is that of The Doors’ former lead singer, Jim Morrison.

• In Japan, some restaurants serve smaller portions to women, even though the charge is the same as for a man’s portion.

• The Japanese cremate 93 per cent of their dead, compared with Great Britain, at 67 per cent, and the United States, at just over 12 per cent.

• Approximately one-third of Greenland, the world’s largest island, is national park.

• Kulang, China, runs seven centres for recycled toothpicks. People bringing used toothpicks to the recycling centres are paid the equivalent of 35 cents per pound weight.

• Floor-cleaning products in Venezuela have ten times the pine fragrance of British floor-cleaners, as Venezuelan women won’t buy a weaker fragrance. They wet-mop their tile floors twice a day, leaving windows and doors open so the scent can waft out to the street and send the message that their houses are clean.

• Windsor Castle is home to the ghosts of King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, King Charles I and King George III. Henry VIII is supposed to haunt the cloisters near the Deanery with ghostly groans and the sound of dragging footsteps.

• All education through to university level is free in the Eastern European nation of Azerbaijan.

• Canada is the largest importer of American cars.

• No one knows how many people live in Bhutan, a small independent kingdom on the slopes of the Himalayas. As of 1975, no census has ever been taken.

• On average, fifty-one cars a year overshoot and drive into the canals of Amsterdam.

• London cabbies estimate their average driving speed to be 9mph (14km/h) due to increasing traffic congestion.

• The area of Greater Tokyo – meaning the city, its port, Yokohama, and the suburban prefectures of Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa – contains less than 4 per cent of Japan’s land area, but fully one-quarter of its 123 million-plus people.

• Based on population, Chinese Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in the world. Spanish follows second, with English third and Bengali fourth.

• At about 200 million years old, the Atlantic Ocean is the youngest of the world’s oceans.

• In Finland, the awards for best children’s fairy tales by children are held on 18 October, known as Satu’s Day. The international competition for children ages 7 to 13 has been held since 1993, and its rules are translated into five languages.

• Britain is roughly nine times more densely populated than America, with 588 people per mile² (227 people per km²) as compared with America’s 65 people per mile² (25 people per km²).

• In China there are 600 bicycles for every car.

• At London’s Drury Lane Theatre, there have been numerous sightings of a ghost described as a soft-green glow, or a handsome young man. During renovation to the theatre in the late 1970s, workers found a skeleton wearing the remnants of a grey riding coat and with a knife sticking out of its ribs. The deceased was found to be a young ghost-hunter who was murdered in 1780.

• Among the tallest people in the world are the Tutsi from Rwanda and Burundi, in central Africa, with the men averaging 6ft (1.8m) in height.

• At 12,000ft (3,658m) above sea level, there is barely enough oxygen in La Paz, Bolivia, to support combustion. The city is nearly fireproof.

• Of the 15,000-odd known species of orchids in the world, 3,000 of them can be found in Brazil.

• Given one square metre per person, all the people in the world could fit on the Indonesian island of Bali, if they stood shoulder to shoulder.

• In a recent five-year period, twenty-four residents of Tokyo died while bowing to other people.

• Australia is home to 500 species of coral.

• A Chinese soap hit it big with consumers in Asia, with the bold claim that users would lose weight by washing with it. The soap was promptly banned.

• One in five people in the world’s population live in China.

• In Wales, there are more sheep than people. The human population for Wales is 2,921,000, while there are approximately 5,000,000 sheep.

• The country with the most post offices is India, with over 152,792.

• In Switzerland, when a male reaches 20 years of age he is required to undergo fifteen weeks of military training. Over the next few decades, he has to attend training camps until he has accrued 300 to 1,300 days of active service. Swiss men who live abroad don’t have to serve in the Swiss military, but they are required to pay 2 per cent of their income in the form of a military exemption tax. Men who don’t qualify for military service also pay the tax, but women aren’t required to pay the tax, nor are they expected to serve in the Swiss army.

• Ireland boasts the highest per capita consumption of cereal in the world – 15lb (6.8kg) per person annually.

• The popular American comic strip ‘Peanuts’ is known as ‘Radishes’ in Denmark.

• In Cupar, Scotland, in June of 1842, women hanging clothing on clothes-lines in an open area heard a sudden detonation, after which the clothes shot upwards into the air. Eventually, some of the clothing did fall back to the ground, but the rest kept ascending until it disappeared. Even odder, the clothes were carried off to the north, but chimney smoke in that area indicated that the wind was moving to the south.

• The country of Togo has the lowest crime rate in the world, with an average of just eleven reported crimes annually for every 100,000 of the population.

• The state bird of Texas is the mockingbird.

• Contrary to many reports, the Eisenhower Interstate System does not require that one mile in every five must be straight in the United States. The claim that these straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies does not exist in any federal legislation. Korea and Sweden do use some of their roads as military airstrips, though.

• There are more than 100 offences that carry the death penalty in Iran.

• Airborne sand from the Sahara desert has been picked up 2,000 miles (3,216km) over the ocean.

• With an exchange rate running at an average of 177,000 Ukrainian karbovanets to the US dollar, total assets of just $6 will qualify a person as a Ukrainian millionaire.

• The tallest, longest, fastest and greatest drop roller coaster in the world is the Daidarasaurus in Nagashima Spa Land, Japan. It is 8,133ft (2.479m) long, 318ft (97m) high, has a drop of 307ft (93.5m) and a top speed of 95mph (153km/h).

• Close to 72 per cent of Australia’s Aboriginals live in towns and cities.

• Over many centuries of living in the Arctic, Eskimos’ bodies have adapted to the cold. Eskimos tend to be short and squat, which brings their arms and legs closer to the heart, so there is less danger of freezing. Extra fat around the torso protects their internal organs from the cold. The metabolism of Eskimos is also set a little higher than that of other peoples. As a result, they burn their food faster to stay warm. Their veins and arteries are also arranged to carry more warming blood to their hands.

• The full name for Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is the third longest country name in the world.

• Greenland ranks as the country with the highest percentage of smoking teenagers, with 56 per cent of 15-year-old boys and 45 per cent of 15-year-old girls smoking a cigarette daily.

• The country of Yemen has the world’s highest fertility rate (average number of births per woman), at 7.6, while Switzerland has the world’s lowest, at 1.5.

• Studies show that Chinese babies cry less and are more easily consoled than American babies.

• The Gulf Stream carries about 30 billion gallons (136 billion litres) of water every second – six times as much water as all the rivers in the world.

• Roughly 40 per cent of the population of the underdeveloped world is under 15 years old.

• London Heathrow Airport is the busiest international airport in the world, typically handling over 68 million international passengers a year.

• In terms of beer consumption, Britain is ranked seventh in the world, with the average Brit drinking 180 pints a year. The heaviest drinkers are in the Czech Republic, each consuming 281 pints a year on average.

• Japan overtook Sweden as the world’s most geriatric nation in 2005.

• Japan is also the largest harvester of seafood in the world, taking 15 per cent of the world’s total catch.

• When T.E. Lawrence returned from Arabia, he tried to become anonymous, often using the false names Ross and Shaw.

• In Thailand, the bodies of monks are preserved, once deceased, and placed on public display. However, thanks to an atmosphere of smog, humidity and heat, these corpses still retain teeth, hair and skin decades after their deaths, even though no special techniques are used to preserve the bodies.

• Throughout the South Pacific, no building is taller than the tallest palm tree.

• According to legend, visitors who wish to return to Rome must throw a coin into the city’s Trevi fountain.

• Per capita, the Irish eat more chocolate than Americans, Swedes, Danes, French and Italians.

• Portugal was the first European country to start building its overseas empire.

• There are castles on the River Rhine in Germany called the Cat and Mouse castles.

• Munich has a chiming clock on its medieval town hall with two tiers of dancing and jousting figures that emerge twice daily.

• The Parthenon, in Athens, is built in the Doric style of architecture.

• Stockholm is known as the ‘Venice of the North’.

• More than 1,000 languages are spoken in Africa.

• Shanghai, China, is sometimes called ‘the Paris of the East’ and ‘the Whore of China’.

• The Spanish Steps are actually in Rome.

• There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.

• Nearly half the population of Alaska live in one city, Anchorage.

• The Ainu are the aboriginal people of Japan.

• The women of the Tiwi tribe in the South Pacific are married at birth.

• The bulk of the island of Tenerife is the volcanic mountain, Mount Teide.

• The Canary Islands were once known as Blessed or Fortunate Isles.

• Mount Aso, in Japan, is the world’s largest volcanic crater.

• Approximately one quarter of the world’s population is Chinese.

• Denmark has the oldest flag in the world.

• China has the most borders with other countries.

• Polish people use zloty (‘golden’) as currency.

• The Romany people were wrongly thought to have come from Egypt, earning them the nickname ‘gypsies’.

• Zaire was formerly known as the Belgian Congo.

• Nicaragua is the largest and most sparsely populated state in Central America.

• Colombia’s largest export is cocaine.

• ‘Himalayas’ means ‘abode of snow’.

• The Karakoram mountain range is known as the ‘roof of the world’.

• Venice consists of 118 islands linked by 400 bridges.

• France is sometimes called the ‘Hexagon’ because it is roughly six-sided.

• Socrates taught Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle.

• Prime Minister William Gladstone’s middle name was Ewart.

• Ronald Reagan was a sports commentator before becoming a Hollywood actor.

• Reagan once advertised Chesterfield cigarettes.

• Four American presidents were assassinated while in office: Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield and Kennedy.

• Linus Pauling is the only man ever to win two individual Nobel prizes; one for peace, the other for chemistry.

• In the 1969 Sydney to Hobart race, British Prime Minister Edward Heath captained the winning team in the yacht Morning Cloud.

• President Lincoln’s advisor during the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, was born a slave.

• American astronaut John Glenn became a US senator in 1974 but was unsuccessful in his bid to become a Democratic presidential candidate.

• John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president of the United States.

• Robin Hood became a titled gentleman called the Earl of Huntingdon.

• A fellow prison inmate killed the American serial sex murderer Jeffrey Dahmer in 1994.

• JFK is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.

• Nathuran Godse assassinated Gandhi in 1948.

• Malcolm X’s daughter, Qubilah Bahiyah Shabazz, was charged with allegedly hiring a hitman to kill the leader of Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.

• When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon in 1969, Michael Collins was left behind in the command module.

• John F. Kennedy represented Massachusetts as senator.

• Stella Rimington was the first woman to head MI5.

• Ronald Reagan’s Scottish terriers were called Scotch and Soda.

• The Tibetan mountain people use yak’s milk as their form of currency.

• Spain literally means ‘the land of rabbits’.

• Little pools of unfrozen water can sometimes be found underneath the great icy plains of the Antarctic.

• Ten per cent of the salt mined in the world each year is used to de-ice the roads in the USA.

• The Spanish Inquisition once condemned the entire Netherlands to death for heresy.

• The River Nile has frozen over only twice in living memory – once in the 9th century and again in the 11th century.

• The Angel Falls in Venezuela are nearly twenty times taller than Niagara Falls.

• Dirty snow melts more quickly than clean snow.

• The Scandinavian capital, Stockholm, is built on nine islands connected by bridges.

• The Forth railway bridge in Scotland is a metre (33in) longer in summer than in winter, due to thermal expansion.

• In the Andes, time is often measured by how long it takes to smoke a cigarette.

• Until the 18th century, India produced almost all the world’s diamonds.

• The Earth’s magnetic field is not permanent.

• On 30 March 1867, Alaska was officially purchased from Russia for about 2 cents an acre. At the time, many politicians believed this purchase of ‘wasteland to be a costly folly’.

• During winter, the skating rinks in Moscow cover more than 2,690,980ft² (250,000m²) of land.

• As the Pacific plate moves under its coast, the North Island of New Zealand is getting larger.

• Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.

• If you travel from east to west across the Soviet Union, you will cross seven time zones.

• Sahara means ‘desert’ in Arabic.

• On 15 January 1867, there was a severe frost in London, and over forty people died in Regent’s Park when the ice broke on the main lake and they fell into the freezing waters.

• The water in the Dead Sea is so salty that it is far easier to float than to drown in it.

• The state flag of Alaska was designed by a 13-year-old boy.

• Lightning strikes the Earth about 200 times a second.

• Very hard rain would pour down at the rate of about 20mph (32km/h).

• Discounting Australia, which is generally regarded as a continental land mass, the world’s largest island is Greenland.

• No rain has ever been recorded falling in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

• The background radiation in Aberdeen is twice that of the rest of Great Britain.

• About 2 million hydrogen atoms would be required to cover the full stop at the end of this sentence.

• The southernmost tip of Africa is not the Cape of Good Hope, but Cape Agulhas.

• During its lifetime, the Tower of London has had many roles, including that of a zoo.

• Two minor earthquakes occur every minute somewhere in the world.

• In the north of Norway, the sun shines constantly for about fourteen weeks each summer.

• The Polynesian country of Niue is a 65.6-mile² (170km²) limestone rock emerging 197ft (60m) from the Pacific.

• Icelandic phone books are listed by the given name, not the surname.

• The United States, which accounts for 6 per cent of the population of the world, consumes nearly 60 per cent of the world’s resources.

• The world’s longest freshwater beach is located in Canada.

• Over the years, the Niagara Falls have moved more than 6.8 miles (11km) from their original site.

• The number of births in India each year is greater than the entire population of Australia.

• Yugoslavia is bordered by seven other countries.

• Greenland – so named to attract settlers – was discovered by Eric the Red in the 10th century.

• Within a few years of Columbus’s discovery of America, the Spaniards had killed 1.5 million Native Americans.

• Hawaii officially became a part of the USA on 14 June 1900.

• The fastest tectonic movement on Earth is 9.4in (240mm) per year, at the Tonga micro-plate near Samoa.

• If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

• The Earth is actually pear-shaped, the radius to the North Pole being 1.7in (44mm) longer than the South Pole radius.

• In 1908, the Moskva River in Russia rose 29ft 6in (9m), flooding 100 streets and 2,500 houses.

• South Africa produces two-thirds of the world’s gold.

• There is about 200 times more gold in the world’s oceans than has been mined in our entire history.

• One quarter of Russia is covered by forest.

• There is a rocking stone in Cornwall that, though it weighs many tons, can be rocked with ease.

• The volume of water in the Amazon is greater than the next eight largest rivers in the world combined.

• There is no point in England more than 75 miles (121km) from the ocean.

• England is smaller than New England.

• Nearly a quarter of the population of Poland was killed in World War II.

• There is a town in West Virginia called Looneyville.

• One of the greatest natural disasters of recent centuries occurred when an earthquake hit Tangshan, China, in 1976, killing three-quarters of a million people.

• New York was once called New Amsterdam.

• On Pitcairn Island, it is a criminal offence to shout ‘Ship ahoy!’ when there is, in fact, no ship in sight.

• The Dead Sea is actually an inland lake.

• There are 6 million trees in the Forest of Martyrs near Jerusalem, symbolising the Jewish death toll in World War II.

• Hawaii’s Mount Waialeale is the wettest place in the world – it rains about 90 per cent of the time, about 480in (12,192mm) per annum.

• Between 1075 and 1080, the Norman baron Eudo Dapifer built Colchester Castle around the podium of the Roman temple of Claudius, creating the largest Norman keep in Britain.

• In Tokyo, to buy a three-line classified ad in the newspaper costs £1,800 per day.

• Hawaiian lore teaches that the earth mother Papa mated with the sky father Wakea to give birth to the Hawaiian islands.

• There are many kremlins in the Soviet Union. ‘Kremlin’ simply means the centre of government, which can be applied to the government buildings in any town.

• The per capita use of soap in Great Britain is 40oz (1,134g) per year. In France, it is only 22.6oz (641g) per year.

• There is a monastery in Ethiopia that can be entered only by climbing up a rope dropped over the edge of a cliff.

• In Turkey, when someone is in mourning they wear purple clothing, not black.

• The desert country of Saudi Arabia must import sand from other countries. This is because the Saudi desert sand is not suitable for building construction.

• In Tibet, some women have special metal instruments with which to pick their noses.

• There is a chemical waste dump in the Soviet Union that is twice as big as the whole state of Vermont.

• Nights in the Tropics are warm because moist air retains heat well. Desert nights get cold rapidly because dry air does not hold heat to the same degree.

• The largest Gothic cathedral is not in Rome or Paris, but on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City: it is the Cathedral of St John the Divine.

• The smallest church in the world is in Kentucky. There is room inside for just three people.

• Only 8.5 per cent of all Alaskans are Eskimos.

• Reno, Nevada, is farther west than Los Angeles, California.

• Twenty-four per cent of Los Angeles, California, consists of roads and parking lots for cars.

• There is a house in Margate, New Jersey, that is made in the shape of an elephant. Another home, in Norman, Oklahoma, is shaped like a chicken.

• There is a house in Massachusetts that is made entirely from newspapers, including the floors, walls and even the furniture.

• Another house, this one in Canada, is made from 18,000 discarded glass bottles.

• The Greek word for brotherly love is philadelphia.

• The worst American city to live in, from the viewpoint of air pollution, is St Louis, Missouri.

• Over half of all Americans travel more than a million miles (1.6 million km) in their lifetimes.

• American drivers average about 8,200 miles (13,200km) a year.