Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (2 page)
GREETINGS FROM UNCLE
KNOW-IT-ALL
Okay, nobody can know
everything
—not even Uncle John. But it’s fun to know a little about a lot of different subjects. That’s where your faithful friends at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute come in. We love to collect fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. Then we quiz each other: “Hey, Brian, did you know that you can hear an elephant’s stomach rumble from 200 yards away?” Or, “Hey, Patrick, did you know that only 1% of the water on Earth is drinkable?” Or, “Hey, Stephanie, did you know that spiders sometimes get trapped in their own webs?” We could go on all day (and night) doing that, couldn’t you?
Hey, what a great idea for a book!
So here it is: our kooky compendium of weird and wonderful facts—just like the encyclopedia…only fun. Use it to test your teachers, freak out your friends, mesmerize your mom, dazzle your dad, and baffle your brothers and sisters. (You may even feel yourself getting smarter.)
Happy reading and as always,
Go with the Flow!
Uncle John and the Bathroom Reader Staff
• Hard hats were invented and first used in the building of the Hoover Dam in 1933.
• The sandals that the Statue of Liberty is wearing are size 879. (They’re about 25 feet long.)
• The Great Wall of China stretches 1,500 miles and contains almost a billion bricks.
• On a clear day, you can see four states from the top of Chicago’s Sears Tower: Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
• The Eiffel Tower is repainted every seven years. It takes 60 tons of brown paint to do the job.
• There’s evidence that after the Pilgrim ship
Mayflower
sailed from England to America (and back), it was taken apart and made into a barn in England.
• What kind of stone is Mount Rushmore made of? Granite. It was “carved” mostly with dynamite.
• Egypt’s Great Sphinx is 260 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 65 feet tall, making it the largest stone statue in the world.
• While the rest of the world had wheels, the Aztecs had no knowledge of them.
Even if you speak it, there’s still plenty to learn about it
.
• Very few words in English use “en” to pluralize them. Some are: ox (oxen), brother (brethren), child (children), man (men), and woman (women).
• While many Western languages, such as Spanish, Italian, and French, are Latin-based, English isn’t—it’s mostly derived from German.
• There are 812 three-letter words in current usage in the English language, and 857 fifteen-letter words.
• The Brooklyn accent—saying “dese, dem, and dose” for “these, them, and those”—came from the Dutch accent of the original settlers. Want to hear a Brooklyn accent? Just listen to Bugs Bunny.
• In 1737 Benjamin Franklin made a list of American slang terms for drunkenness—and came up with 228 of them.
• “Pants” was a dirty word in England in the 1880s.
• “Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt.”
• The North American National Scrabble Association recognizes five words worth 392 points—the most anyone can score in a single turn: OXAZEPAM, BEZIQUES, CAZIQUES, MEZQUITS, and MEZQUITE.
Some of the things you could tell a visiting Martian about your home planet
.
• Lake Baikal in Russia is the world’s deepest lake—it’s deep enough for five Empire State Buildings to stand in it on top of each other.
• Millions of years ago, the Earth consisted of one land mass surrounded by a vast ocean. Geologists call the land
Pangaea
(Greek for “all land”); they call the ocean
Panthalassa
(“all sea”).
• Sometime between 180 and 200 million years ago, Pangaea broke into two parts:
Laurasia
, which consisted of what is now North America, Europe, and part of Asia; and
Gondwanaland
—what’s now South America, Africa, Australia, India, and Antarctica.
• Where’s the Earth’s core? Directly under your feet, 4,000 miles down.
• Tallest mountain on Earth: Not Mt. Everest—it’s Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, which rises 33,476 feet from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
• Want to travel as fast as a jet plane while standing still? Stand on the equator. The Earth’s spin is greatest there, moving you at more than 1,000 miles per hour.
• What do you call the tip of a glacier? The
snout
.
• The way at which the Earth is tipped on its axis—at an angle of 23 ½
°
—is what causes the seasons.
• Scientists think the Earth’s core is hotter than the surface of the Sun.
• Take a deep breath: If air were liquid, it would form a layer over the Earth about 33 feet deep.
• Wind blowing against a mountain range can actually speed up or slow down the Earth’s rotation.
• California’s San Andreas fault is slipping about two inches a year, causing Los Angeles to move closer to San Francisco. At this rate, L.A. will be a San Francisco suburb in about 15 million years.
• 95% of all life on Earth lives in the range between 300 feet below sea level and 9,000 feet above sea level.
• It hardly moves, but it accounts for 85% of all life on Earth: It’s plankton, which consists of microscopic plants and animals that float around in the water.
• About 100 million tons of sand particles travel around the Earth every year, carried by breezes.
• Here comes the tide: The Atlantic Ocean is getting wider by an inch or more every year.
• In the last 10,000 years, Niagara Falls has moved about 10 miles upstream. That means that the falls are eroding at the rate of five feet a year.
• What’s the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust? Oxygen. (Second most abundant: silicon.)
…without fail, here’s what happens
…
• The Earth travels more than 1.5 million miles in its orbit around the Sun.
• 2.5 billion adults go to work; 1 billion kids go to school.
• Lightning strikes 8 million times.
• The bees of the world make 3,300 tons of honey.
• Crayola makes 5 million crayons.
• The world’s humans produce 2.2 billion tons of poop.
• 200,000 Americans have surgery.
• Two people in Sri Lanka die from poisonous snakebites.
• Birthdays are celebrated by 16.5 million people.
• Americans eat 15 million hamburgers.
• The chickens of the world lay 2 billion eggs.
• The Amazon River gushes 8 trillion gallons of water into the Atlantic Ocean.
• 380,000 babies are born; 145,000 people die.
• Ancient Celtic warriors were known to fight naked. From head to toe, their skin was dyed blue.
• The Arabs didn’t invent Arabic numerals—the Hindus of India did. The numerals were introduced to Europe by way of Arab traders around the 11th century.
• The Romans used IIII to represent the number 4, as opposed to IV, because IV was the symbol reserved for Jupiter, the chief Roman god.
• The first recorded wrestling match took place in Japan in 23 B.C.
• The city of London was founded in 43 B.C.
• The longest Roman aqueduct was 87 miles long. It’s still there—in Tunisia—but it’s been falling into ruin since the 14th century.
• No one knows exactly what Cleopatra looked like, but she was probably not nearly as beautiful as she’s depicted in the movies.
• King Hammurabi’s code of laws was carved into a eight-foot-high stone that was placed in the middle of Babylon 3,700 years ago—even though hardly anyone at the time could read. If you ever want to see it, it’s in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
• Historians think the game of darts originated as archery practice for soldiers.
• Chinese checkers was invented in Germany.
• In 1991 Judit Polgar of Hungary, age 15, became the youngest chess Grandmaster in history. Her sisters, Susan and Sofia, are also chess champions.
• Some soda vending machines in Japan have a game built in. If you press the drink-selection button at the right moment, your drink will be free.
• Charades was so popular in the 1930s and 1940s that it was called “The Game.”
• Jacks is descended from a game called “knucklebones” that was played with sheep bones.
• The average speed of a dart heading toward a dartboard is 40 mph.
• Playing tip: You can extend a game of Hangman by giving the hanging man a hat, bowtie, and shoes.
• The game Othello originated in China more than 3,000 years ago, but in Japan it was a favorite game of the samurai.
• Croquet made its first and last appearance at the Olympics in 1900. The matches also marked the first time that women competed in the Games.
