1. One-fifth of the oxygen we inhale is used up by the cells in the brain.
2. The hair of a man’s beard is about as strong as copper wires of the same dimensions.
3. Our earth is currently inhabited by 1.4 million species of animals and 500, 000 species of plants.
4.The clock tower that supports the famous clock ‘Big Ben’ at the House of parliament in London, is 320 feet high. The bell from which the clock gets its name, weighs 13.5 tons.
5. The plover, a small bird, lives on a crocodile’s body and even struts into the reptile’s mouth to perform its valuable service-that of pecking leeches from the crocodile’s gums and cleaning its teeth. The crocodile seems so grateful to the tiny plover that it never harms the small bird.
6. It takes 48 hours for our body to completely digest the food from one meal.
7. In 1817, a person named Margaret Sanger was jailed for one month for founding Birth-Control clinic.
8. In the 1920s and 1930s, Charlie Chaplin was the most celebrated man in the world. On a visit to his native London, the legendary comedian of Hollywood received 73,000 letters in just two days.
9. The sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, contains all the letters of English alphabets.
10. The masterpiece painting of Mona Lisa was first bought by Francis I, the king of France for decorating his bathroom.
11. The penguin, the Antarctic bird cannot fly. But it can move through water faster than a submarine.
12. The most widely cultivated fruit in the world is the apple. The second is the peer.
13. Experiments with ants have shown that they are capable of lifting stones fifty times than their weight and pulling loads three hundred times their own weight.
14. Animals sometimes can foretell natural calamities-storms, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes sufficiently well ahead of time. Jelly-fish, for example, can sense a storm 10 to 15 hours before it actually occurs, and will leave the shore and go into deep sea.
15.The great Indian epic ‘Mahabharat’ contains almost three million words.
16. If all the oceans on the earth dried up, the rock salt remaining would be enough to build a wall a mile thick and 18 miles high all around the equator.
17. The rarest disease in the world, called Kuru or laughing sickness, affects only the Cannibals of New Guinea and is believed to be caused by eating human brains.
18. The busiest airport in the world is Chicago International Airport, also called O’ Harefield. There planes take off and land every 42.5 seconds round the clock. That means 85 take offs and landings every hour, 2,036 every day, 14,255 every week and 7,41,272 every year.
19. The nerve system in the human brain has a greater number of possible connections than there would be in a unilateral telephone exchange that provided one line to every person living on earth.
20. The world’s most popular hobby is stamp collecting.
21. The largest magnet in the world is the earth itself, because the hot nickel and iron at its core pull everything towards it.
22. What we call the Indian ink actually comes from China.
23. America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who was the first to discover the American mainland in 1499.
24. The lion has the smallest heart of all beasts of prey.
25. Petroleum is the world’s first largest item of international commerce. Coffee is world’s second.
26. The complete root system of the pumpkin plant would stretch for 24 kilometres, if every root was laid end to end.
27. If all the blood vessels in our body were straightened out and placed end to end, they would be 100,000 miles long, long enough to go round the equator 4 times.
28. The water in the world’s oceans would fill a pipe 120.7 kms in diameter and 112.651kms high, stretching nearly one third of the way to the moon.
29. We blink our eyes once every six seconds. In our life time we blink about 250 million times.
30. According to psychological study, women talk about three times as often as men talk about women.
31. 96 percent of babies are born at times different from those predicted by the medical profession.
32. The Red Sea is the warmest and saltiest of all seas. No rivers empty into it. It is surrounded by parched land and is continually evaporating. Its salt content is 43 to 46 grams per kilogram of water.
33. Rainbows only occur when the Sun is at an angle of less than 4o degree above the horizon.
34. The most common disease in the world is tooth-decay.
35. The record for the most weddings is held by king Mogul of Siam (Thailand) who had 9000 weddings and 9000 wives.
36. One of the candidates who failed at his first attempt to pass the entrance examinations for the Federal Polytechnic of Zurich was world famous scientist Albert Einstein.
37.The English word with the most meanings is the simpler 3-letter word ‘set’. It has 51 meanings as nouns, 126 meanings as a verb and 10 meanings as a participate adjective.
38. Leonardo da Vinci was the only person who could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.
39. Insects are eaten as food in many parts of the world. The favourite insects are grasshopper, beetles, crickets, locusts, termite and ants.
40. Each square inch of human skin consists of 19 million cells, 60 hairs, 90 oil glands, 19 feet of blood vessels, 625 sweat glands and 19,000 sensory cells.
41. The Emperor penguin of the Antarctic can reach a depth of 870 feet and remain submerged for as long as 18 minutes.
42. In the twelfth century king Henry I declared that a yard was to equal the distance from the end of his nose to the end of his thumb.
43. If you had fifteen books on a self and you arrange them in every possible combination, and if you made one change every minutes, it would take you 2,487,966 years to do them all.
44. It is impossible to sneeze and keep your eyes open at the same time.
45. If sugar is added to a glass of water and an egg is then added, the egg will float in the water.
46. Milk is heavier than cream.
47. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 muscles to frown.
48. South Arabia imports sand from Scotland and camels from North Africa.
49. You can tell a fish’s age by counting the rings on its scale. In the same way you can estimate the age of a tree by counting the rings in the trunk.
50. The Mediterranean is the bluest sea. Its blue, limpid water is poor in fish food, plankton. This is why catches are small in it.
51. The Dead Sea is actually a lake 45 miles long and 10 miles wide. This salt body of water is 1,300 feet below sea level and is the lowest spot on the surface of earth..
52. The Great White Shark is the only creature living in the sea that has no natural enemies. Even the killer whales avoid it.
53. The Danish flag, a white cross on a red ground, is the oldest national flag, and was introduced in 1219.
54. Sunlight does not penetrate more than 400 metres deep into the sea.
55. We can distinguish 10,000 types of different smells.
56. Nearly all our weather is produced in lower 15 kms of the atmosphere.
57. The Great Wall of China is one of the very few manmade objects that would be visible from the moon.
58. Any five digit number multiplied by 11 and then multiplied by 9091 will reappear twice in the product.
59. The twenty-first wife of Hieronymus, a ruler of Rome had been married twenty times before.
60. The sun burns 240, 000, 000 tonnes of hydrogen dust every minute.
61. Peanuts are used in the manufacture of dynamite.
62. The thirteen day of the month is more likely to fall on Friday than on any other day of the week.
63. Banana oil does not come from bananas. It is a chemical distillate obtained from coal.
64. Sodium burns fiercely when placed in water but it can be stored quite in paraffin.
65. At an altitude of 7,620 metres a pilot can see for a distance of 312 kilometres.
66. Grasshoppers have white blood.
67. Soya beans are used in the manufactur- ing of glue, plastics, paint and explosives.
68. The only animal that sleeps on its back is man.
69. The sea bird albatross of Arctic region can fly all day and not flap its wings once.
70. The name of the first Test-Tube baby of the world is Louise Joy Brown.
71. The National Flag of Britain is called Union Jack.
72. The fastest creature of the world is the spine-tailed swift. It flies at a speed of 170 km per hour.
73. The First Test Captain of Indian Cricket team was C.K. Nayudy, the colonel in the army of the King of Indore. He led the Indian team against England in 1932.
74. S. Venkataraghavan the former Indian cricket team’s skipper and umpire, led India in the first two World Cups in 1975 and 1979.
75. A farmer on the bank of Hood River, Oregon in USA produced an apple of 15 cm long and weighing 1 kg.
76. Famous Woman tennis player Martina Hingis of Switzerland became the youngest Grand Slam Champion in modern tennis at the age of 16 in 1997.
77. Edmund Hilary, the mountaineer of New Zealand who became the first person to climb Mt. Everest was a Beekeeper by profession.
78. The female rhinoceros gives birth to its young ones after a pregnancy of 560 days.
79. The Kurinji plant which is found on the hillsides of South India bears flowers once in 12 years.
80. The snake can taste and smell with its tongue.
81. Rakhal Das Banerjee, the great Indian historian and archeologist discovered the Mohenjo Daro Civilization of ancient India.
82. Sir Albert Einstein, the great scientist and mathematician of the world, failed in mathematics in the entrance examination of the Federal Polytechnic College of Zurich, Switzerland.
83. The sentences THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG and PACK MY BOX WITH FIVE DOZEN LIQUOR JUGS contain all 26 English alphabets.
84. The Great Pyramid of Cheops, Egypt was the tallest construction in the ancient world.
85. The world’s tallest mountain, even higher than Mt. Everest is Mauna Koa, an underwater mountain which rises 33,476 feet and has its peak on the island of Hawaii.
86. The human mouth contains more bacteria than any other organ of the body.
87. India is the leading film making country in the world. More than twice as many films are made in India each year than in France, the third highest film producers in the world.
88. Two normal kidneys contain 21 million tiny blood filters which filter 50 gallons of blood every day.
89. No solar eclipse can last longer than 7 minutes 58 seconds because of the speed at which the sun moves.
90. Every year more than 50,000 earthquakes take place on earth. Most of them are too slight that they are not noticeable to man.
91. The royal house of Saudi Arabia at present has about 5,000 princes and equal number of princesses. King Abdul Aziz Saud, who ruled the country from 1932 to 1953, had 300 wives.
92. The vehicle jeep got its name from its original initials G.P. which means General Purpose vehicle.
93. World hero and French emperor Napoleon suffered from ailurophobe, the fear of cats.
94. Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Britain during World War II was born in a ladies cloakroom in the ancestral castle of Blenheim. His mother prematurely delivered him while attending a dance there.
95. The tongue of Chameleon which is used for catching the prey, can be extended more than twice the length of the chameleon’s body.
96. We use refrigerators to freeze the food. But the Eskimos, living in Greenland use refrigerator to keep food from freezing.
97. The giant bamboos of South-East Asia can grow almost 1 metre in 24 hours.
98. Eighty percent of the World’s supply of dates comes from Iraq.
99. The twenty-six letters of our English alphabet can be transposed 620,448,401,733,239,439,369,000 times.
100. A yak has the skeleton of a bison, the hair of a goat, the tail of a horse, the head of a cow and makes a grunt like a pig.
101. Common swifts may stay in the air for three years at a time, without landing.
102. The superstitions surrounding the number 13 originated from the ‘Last Super’, when 13 sat down to eat.
103. The buzz of the bee and its movement help the other bees to learn where to look for nectar.
104. You will never catch cold in Antarctica because the germs cannot survive in the severe cold.
105. Conch sea shells were used as trumpets in ancient times. They are still used in the same way in modern Peru.
106. The Sahara desert is as large as Europe and larger than the combined areas of the next nine largest deserts in the world.
107. The nail on our middle finger grows fastest. The nail on the thumb grows slowest.
108. When a piece of glass cracks, the cracks move at a speed of over 4,800 kms per hour.
109. It was claimed that a tiger shot by famous author and hunter Jim Corbett in 1907 had killed 436 people in India.
110. Bobby Walt hour is a Marathon bicycle racer. He was twice declared dead during a 60 day race. But he recovered each time and continued to complete..
111. The pineapple is a berry and has nothing to do with pines or apples except for its name.
112. The monarch butterflies migrate more than 3,000 kilometers every year.
113. Spiders are able to manufacture anesthetics, glue, and glue-proof oil and silk within their bodies.
114. An elephant cannot run. It cannot leap or jump under any conditions. Its body does not have the bone-muscle-tendon combination necessary for such locomotion. So, an elephant can walk only. However, it can walk faster than a man can run.
115. 26 countries in the world have no coastline at all.
116. It takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty three muscles to frown.
117. If sugar is added to a glass of water and an egg is then added, the egg will float in the water.
118. A human hair laid on a bar of steel and then passed through a cold rolling mill would leave an imprint on the face of the steel.
119. A man and a woman in Mexico City were engaged for 67 years and finally married at the age of 82.
120. The human jaw can bear more than 279 kgs of weight.
121. Of all the world’s major languages, English has the largest vocabulary about 800,000 words.
122. The worst tornado ever recorded is the tornado hurtled over Texas, USA at a speed only slightly slower than the official world water speed record, 464.45 km/h.
123. One square mile of land contains more insects than the total number of human-beings on earth.
124. The human body contains enough phosphorus in which the heads of 2000 match sticks can be made, enough fat for making 7 bars of soap and enough iron to make one nail.
125. The biggest among the whales-the largest animal in our earth is the Sulphur bottom whale, which is 150 feet in length and 30 feet in girth.
126. The chalk with which we write is a soft white rock, largely containing calcium carbonate. This rock is formed from the shells of minute marine animals, which lived centuries ago.
127. The letter which is used most in English language is ‘E’ and the letter in least use is ‘Q’ .
128. The secretary bird can swallow hen’s egg whole without breaking the shell.
129. One quarter of the world’s cattle live in India.
130. Stars can be seen from the bottom of a well even in daylight.
131. All the mammals, except man and monkey, are colour-blind.
132. The largest bird Ostrich is eight feet tall and weighs 300 pounds .
133. Every minutes 12 cars are manufactured in USA.
134. A kangaroo can hop at an estimated speed of 41 km per hour.
135. The human eye can distinguish about 17,000 different colours.
136. The shrew, a small mouse like animal with a sharp nose, is the most ferocious creature in the world. Only two inches long, it is poisonous like cobra. It eats twice of its own weight and can whip an animal in its tail three times of its size.
137. Among all land animals the polar bear is the longest swimmer. It swims as far as 600 kilometres from the seashore.
138. The whale is the most powerful animal in the world. It can pull a fast moving big boat in the opposite direction for long hours at a speed of about 10 miles per hour.
139. Cockroach is a sturdy insect and can eat any organic material. It appeared in the earth 350 million years ago. There are more than 3,000 species of cockroach.
140. The sea shark gets its name from the German word ‘schurke’ which means scoundrel.
141. The horn of the rhinoceros is not actually a horn but hair which grows into a horn.
142. The stripes of zebras are like human finger prints. As fingers prints of two people are not alike, similarly no two zebras’ striped are alike.
143. Giraffe gets its name from the Arabic word ‘ziraboh’ meaning long neck.
144. The insect dragonfly can fly at a speed of 80 km per hour.
145. The Condor, a large vulture is the heaviest bird of prey in the world. It lives in the highest part of the Andes, major mountain of South America. P-55, w-14
146. The Red Fire-Fish can fly and give out sounds like a crow.
12. The largest turtle in the earth is the Pacific Leatherback that is 6 to 7 feet in length.
147. The mosquito has 47 teeth.
148. Mice and rats never drink water.
149. The world’s smallest bird Hummingbird flies at a speed of 50 to 55 miles per hour.
150. Tigers always fear a pack of wolves.
151. The slowest moving animal in the world is the tortoise. This reptile moves at a speed of 0.17 miles per hour.
152. The polar bear is the fastest runner and swimmer among the bears. It can run at a speed of 55 km per hour and swim at a speed of 5 to 10 km per hour.
153. Enid Mary Blyton (1900-1968), an English Children’s writer wrote 600 books.
154. The wonder bird Arctic terns are the greatest migrators in the animal kingdom. They travel every year to the Antarctic continent to escape the severe northern winter. After winter they return back. The total distance covered by the terns is more than 40,000 kms.
155. A painting picture of a violin in the music room of Chatsworth House of England is reached for by almost every visitor. Everybody thinks it as a real violin.
156. 3.5 million people, most of them children, die every year in the world from water related diseases.
157. The people of Sweden of Europe are the most voracious newspaper readers of the world. About 650 persons out of 1000 buy newspapers.
158. Morvi, a small town in Gujarat is world’s largest manufacturer of wall clocks. Ajanta clocks, the world’s largest manufacturer of wall clocks is located there.
159. Most people move about forty times in their sleep during night.
160. The house lizards are perfectly harmless. They neither bite nor are they aggressive. They help human beings by eating insects like flies and mosquitoes.
161. People who are not married are seven and half times more likely to be hospitalized as psychiatrics than those of married.
162. Lightning strikes the earth a hundred times every second from the 1800 thunder storms in progress at any given moment.
163. The word ‘tip’ is an abbreviation of ‘To Insure Promptness’.
164. Primary colours -red, yellow and blue are so called because they cannot be obtained by mixing any other colour. The secondary colours can be produced by mixing any two of these in equal amounts. Such as orange=red+yellow, violet= red+blue, green=yellow+blue. The intermediate colours are obtained by mixing one primary and one secondary colour in equal amounts.
165. The sandwich owes its name to John Montague, 4th Earl of Sandwich. He was always asking for a slice of meat between two slices of bread while he was at the gaming table.
166. There is more sugar in one kilogram of lemons than one kilogram of strawberries.
167. The word ‘karate’ means ‘empty hand’.
168. Salt was once a very precious commodity so that many people were paid their wages in salt .
169. Upto 30,000 tonnes of cosmic dust are deposited on the earth each year.
170. The sun weighs 330,000 times as much as the earth.
171. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.
172. The name of all the continents ends with the same letter that they start with.
173. The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
174. The month of December is the most popular month for weddings in the Philippines.
175. A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
176. There are 701 types of pure breed dogs.
177. The animal responsible for the most human deaths world-wide is the mosquito.
178. Carbon monoxide can kill a person in less than 15 minutes.
179. The biggest member of the cat family is the male lion, which weighs 240 kilograms.
180. A cockroach will live nine days without its head, before it starves to death.
181. Dragonflies are one of the fastest insects, flying 50 to 60 mph.
182. Americans spend more than 5.4 billion dollars on their pets each year.
183. It is estimated that a single toad may catch and eat as many as 10,000 insects in the course of a summer.
184. Howler monkeys are the noisiest land animals. Their calls can be heard over 2 miles away.
185. The world’s largest rodent is the Capybara. It is an Amazon water hog that looks like a guinea pig; it can weigh more than 50 kg.
186. A chameleon’s tongue is twice the length of its body.
187. Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.
188. The blood of mammals is red, the blood of insects is yellow, and the blood of lobsters is blue.
189. The Barbie doll has more than 80 careers.
190. Coca-Cola was originally green.
191. 19 major earthquakes per year:- It is estimated that there are several million earthquakes in the world each year. Many of these earthquakes go undetected because they occur in remote areas or have very small magnitudes. The US Earthquake Info Center locates 12 000 to 14 000 earthquakes each year, about 35 per day. On average, about 60 earthquakes per year are classified as significant, with 19 classified as major. A significant earthquake is one of magnitude 6.5 or higher or one of lesser magnitude that causes casualties or considerable damage. Major earthquakes have a magnitude larger than 7.0.
192. Bird barks instead of sings:- The Antpitta avis canis Ridgley is a bird that looks like a stuffed duck on stilts and barks like a dog. The bird was discovered by ornithologist Robert S. Ridgley in the Andes in Ecuador in June 1998. Thirty of these long-legged, black-and-white barking birds were found. It apparently had gone undetected because it lives in remote parts and, of course, doesn’t sing. The size of a duck, it is one of the largest birds discovered in the last 50 years.
193. Dogs that do not bark:- There are dogs those do not bark. The basenji, smallish dog with a silky copper coat, does not bark. Instead, it yodels when it get excited. Wild dogs like the African Wild Dog also do not bark.
194. 90% of all freshwater will be finished within 25 years :-According to UNESCO, the world’s population is appropriating 54% of all the accessible freshwater contained in rivers, lakes and underground aquifers. If per capita consumption of water resources continues to rise at its current rate, humankind could be using over 90% of all available freshwater within 25 years, leaving just 10% for all other living beings. Freshwater lakes and swamps account for a mere 0.29% of the Earth’s freshwater. 20% of all freshwater is in one lake, Lake Baikal in Asia. Another 20% is stored in the Great Lakes, Huron, Michigan, and Superior. Rivers hold only about 0.006% of total freshwater reserves. Mankind essentially uses only a drop in the bucket of the total available water supply. Antarctica, which is thought to hold about 75% of the world’s fresh water (and 90% of the world’s ice).
195. More than a billion bicycles in the world :-There are about a billion bicycles in the world. Almost 400 million bicycles are in China. Frenchman De Sivrac built the first bicycle-type vehicle in 1690. It was referred to as a hobbyhorse. However, it did not have pedals. Those were added in 1840 by a Scottish blacksmith, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, who is credited with inventing the real bicycle. The bicycle as we know it today - with two wheels of the same size - looks almost exactly the same as one from 1900.
196. Animals have much smaller brains than man:- The average brain of an adult male weighs about 1400 gram. The brain of Russian novelist Turgenev, weighed 2021g while Bismarck’s brain weighed 1807g. Female average brain mass is slightly less than that of males. The largest woman’s brain recorded weighed 1742g. An elephant’s brain weighs 5000g and a whale’s 10000g. In proportion to the body, animals have much smaller brains than man. This seem to give man the edge as man has 1 gram of brain to 44g of body.
197. 70% of earth affected by desertification:- About 3,6 billion of the world’s 5.2 billion hectares of useful dry land for agriculture has suffered erosion and soil degradation. In more than 100 countries, 1 billion of the 6 billion world population is affected by desertification, forcing people to leave their farms for jobs in the cities. Desertification is devouring more than 20,000 square miles of land worldwide every year. Desertification affects 74% of the land in North America. In Africa, more than 73% of its dry lands are affected by desertification. Desertification takes place in dry land areas where the earth is especially fragile, where rainfall is nil and the climate harsh. According to a UN study, about 30% of earth’s land - including the 70% of dry land - is affected by drought. Every day, about 33,000 people starve to death.
198. Fresh egg sinks in water, stale one won’t:- Can’t remember if an egg is fresh or hard boiled? Just spin the egg. If it wobbles, it’s raw. If it spins easily, it’s hard boiled. A fresh egg will sink in water, a stale one will float. Eggs contain all the essential protein, minerals and vitamins, except Vitamin C. But egg yolks are one of few foods that naturally contain Vitamin D. The colour of the egg shell is not related to quality, nutrients, flavour, or cooking characteristics. White shelled eggs are produced by hens with white feathers and white ear lobes. Brown shelled eggs are produced by hens with red feathers and red ear lobes. Brown egg layers usually are slightly larger and require more food, thus brown eggs usually cost more than white eggs.
199. Mammals are the only animals with flaps around the ears.
200. African elephants only have four teeth to chew their food with.
201. There are about one billion cattle in the world of which 200 million are in India.
202. A house fly lives only 14 days.
5. A dog was the first in space and a sheep, a duck and a rooster the first to fly in a hot air balloon.
203. The oldest breed of dog is the Saluki.
204. The bee hummingbird of Cuba is the smallest bird in the world.
205. An ostrich can run up to 70 km/h (43mph).
9. An annoyed camel will spit at a person.
206. The world’s smallest dog is the Chihuahua, which means “tiny dog in the sky.”
207. Pea crabs (the size of a pea) are the smallest crabs in the world.
208. 75% of wild birds die before they are 6 months old.
209. The pig is rated the fourth most intelligent animal but are mentioned only twice in the Bible.
210. Sheep are mentioned 45 times and goats 88 times in the Bible. Dogs are mentioned 14 times and lions 89 times, but domestic cats are not mentioned.
211. Pork is the world’s most widely-eaten meat.
212. In Denmark there are twice as many pigs as people.
213. Dinosaurs did not eat grass: there weren’t any at that time.
214. The coyote is a member of the dog family and its scientific name, “canis latrans” means barking dog.
215. A giraffe can clean its ears with its 50cm (20 in) tongue.
216. The slowest fish is the Sea Horse, which moves along at about 0.016 km/h (0.01 mph).
217. Of the total population in the world, 1 out of 10 lives on an island.
218. The largest island in the world is Greenland. Although quite big, it is not considered as a continent because it shares the habitat features of Northern America. Australia is considered a continent as it has unique plant and animal life.
219. The smallest island in the world is Bishop Rock. It is about two acres. It lies at the most south-westerly part of the United Kingdom. It is one of 1040 islands around Britain and only has a lighthouse on it.
220. Most of the 179 584 “islands” around Finland and the almost 200 000 around Canada would not match Indonesia as the country with the most islands. In fact, Indonesia consists only of islands - 13 667 of them, 6000 of which are inhabited.
221. The remotest uninhabited island is Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic.
222. The remotest inhabited island in the world is Tristan da Cunha. It is in the South Atlantic Ocean. It has no TV but it has one radio station. The population totals 242 and they only have 7 surnames between them, so they are all related. Tristan da Cunha does have a capital, called Edinburgh of the South Seas.
223. The smallest independent island country is the Pacific island of Nauru. It measures 21,28 sq km (8.2 sq mi).
224. Indonesia is the largest populated island. More than 200 million people live in Indonesia alone.
225. Iceland is the most volcanically active island. Over one third of Iceland is volcanically active and loaded with lava fields. Iceland is far enough north to be entirely covered by ice, like Greenland to the west of it, but the magma below the surface heats the rock above, keeping it “green.”
226 Greenland is the largest island in the world covered in ice. Greenland is part of Denmark but was granted home rule within the Danish Commonwealth in 1979.
227. It is estimated that there are several million earthquakes in the world each year. Many of these earthquakes go undetected because they occur in remote areas or have very small magnitudes. The USGS Earthquake Info Center locates 12 000 to 14 000 earthquakes each year (about 35 per day). On average, about 60 earthquakes per year are classified as significant, with 19 classified as major. A significant earthquake is one of magnitude 6.5 or higher or one of lesser magnitude that causes casualties or considerable damage. Major earthquakes have a magnitude larger than 7.0.
228. The word “Christmas” means “Mass of Christ,” later shortened to “Christ-Mass.” The even shorter form “Xmas” - first used in Europe in the 1500s - is derived from the Greek alphabet, in which X is the first letter of Christ’s name.
229. The word “dollar” has its origins in the Roman Empire. A mining hole in the mountains of Bohemia produced so much silver it became the official source of coinage for the entire Holy Roman Empire. Over time this became shortened to “Talers” and over more time, the American pronunciation of the word became dollar. The $ sign was designed in 1788 by Oliver Pollock, a New Orleans businessman.
230. Of the 6 billion+ people in the world, one out of ten, 600 million live on islands. More than 200 million people live in Indonesia alone and some 60 million live in Britain.
231. By the time the Wright brothers of USA got their flyer up in the air, flying was a hobby for New Zealand farmer Richard Pearse. Working single-handedly in his barn, he designed and built his own engine and flying machine. Dating suggest that Pearse made his first flight in March 1902. His remarkable success remained unknown until fairly recently.
232. A badminton shuttle travels easily up to 180 km/hr (112 mph). It is one of the fastest objects in sports.
233. Plant-eating dinosaurs did not eat grass. During the Mesozoic Era, when the dinosaurs lived, conifers - cone-bearing trees and shrubs dominated the landscape. They included redwoods, yews, pines, palms, cypress and the monkey puzzle tree. Flowering plants and grass evolved only later.
234. The fossil of a dinosaur fingernail found in Brazil provides new support for the theory of an evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. Brazilian scientists dubbed the dinosaur the Dino-bird of Peiropolis, after the city in Minas Gerais state where the fossil was found some 370 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro. The scientists studying the fossil said that it likely belonged to an unknown group of dinosaurs who walked the Earth some 70 million years ago.
235. A fossil of a 375-million-year-old fish, which could prove how animals evolved out of fish, has been found in Canada. It provided scientists a tool to fill in a gap in understanding how it developed legs for land mobility. Paleontologists are calling the specimen a true “missing link”. Several samples of the fish-like tetrapod, named Tiktaalik roseae, were discovered. The discovery of well preserved skeletons was made in sediments of former streambeds in the Canadian Arctic, about 960 km from the North Pole.
236. The number 13 is considered as unlucky because:- (a). Several mass murderers have 13 letters in their names (eg:- Harold Shipman; Charles Manson; Jeffrey Dahmer) (b). Judas Iscariot was the 13th person to sit at Christ’s table (c). Norse mythology tells of 12 deities sitting down for a banquet, when Loki, the god of mischief, crashed the party, resulting in the death of one of the gods (d). Witches, to oppose themselves to Christian superstition, often make up groups of 13, called covens. (e). In a deck of Tarot cards, the number 13 card is called Death. The fear of number 13 is called:-Triskaideikaphobia.
237. Friday is also considered unlucky because:- (a). Friday was execution day in ancient Rome. (b). Christ is thought to have been crucified on a Friday. (c). Friday used to be Hangman’s Day in Britain. (d). Some believe it was the day God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. (e). Friday is Frigga’s Day (ancient Scandi- navian love & fertility goddess). Yet Christians called Frigga a witch, and Friday the ‘Witches’ Sabbath.’
238. The Emperor penguin of the Antarctic can reach a depth of 870 feet and remain submerged for as long as 18 minutes.
239. It is impossible to sneeze and keep your eyes open at the same time.
240. If sugar is added to a glass of water and an egg is then added, the egg will float in the water.
241. The human body contains enough phosphorus in which the heads of 2000 match sticks can be made, enough fat for making 7 bars of soap and enough iron to make one nail.
242. The chalk with which we write is a soft white rock, largely containing calcium carbonate. This rock is formed from the shells of minute marine animals, who lived centuries ago.
243. It takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty three muscles to frown.
244. The giant bamboos of South-East Asia can grow almost 1 metre in 24 hours.
2456. The Sahara Desert is as large as Europe and larger than the combined areas of the next nine largest deserts in the world.
246. The superstitions surrounding the number 13 originated from the ‘Last Super’, when 13 sat down to eat.
247. You will never catch cold in Antarctica because the germs cannot survive in the severe cold.
248. A yak has the skeleton of a bison, the hair of a goat, the tail of a horse, the head of a cow and makes a grunt like a pig.
249. When a piece of glass cracks, the cracks move at a speed of over 4,800 kms per hour.
250. In Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for most trips of less than 50 minutes!
251. Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second!
252.When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3000 miles per hour. To photograph the event, a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second!
253. It takes glass one million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be recycled an infinite amount of times!
254. Almost half the newspapers in the world are published in the United States and Canada!
255. The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.” uses every letter of the alphabet!
256. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is “uncopyrightable”!
257. During your lifetime, you’ll eat about 60,000 pounds of food, that’s the weight of about 6 elephants!
258. An average person has over 1,460 dreams a year!
259. The most used letter in the English alphabet is ‘E’, and ‘Q’ is the least used!
260. A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.!
261.166,875, 000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year in the U.S!
262. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple, and month!
263. Of all the words in the English language, the word set has the most definitions!
264. In the White House, there are 13,092 knives, forks and spoons!
265. No piece of normal-size paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
266. The Germans tried to copy Coca-Cola and came up with the drink Fanta.
267. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
268. Footprints of astronauts who landed on the moon should last at least 10 million years since the moon has no atmosphere.
269. The national orchestra of Monaco (a nation in Europe) has more individuals than its army.
270. Fathers tend to determine the height of their child, mothers their weight.
271. Barbie’s full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts.
272. Music can help reduce chronic pain by more than 20% and can alleviate depression by up to 25%.
273. State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work is Alaska.
274. Camel’s milk, which is widely drunk in Arab countries, has 10 times more iron than cow’s milk.
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Walt Disney was afraid of mice.
276. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.
277. Every drop of seawater contains approximately 1 billion gold atoms.
278. The largest living thing on the face of the Earth is a mushroom underground in Oregon, it measures three and a half miles in diameter.
279. Honey is the only food that does not spoil.
280. Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first.
281. Blue and white are the most common school colors.
282. Every year the sun loses 360 million tons.
283. The oldest known vegetable is the pea.
284. Jack is the most
common name in nursery rhymes.
285. France has the highest per capita consumption of cheese.
286. Russia has the most movie theaters in the world.
287. The Ottoman Empire once had seven emperors in seven months. They died of: burning, choking, drowning, stabbing, heart failure, poisoning and being thrown from a horse.
288. The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
289. Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
290. The grey whale migrates 12, 500 miles from the Arctic to Mexico and back every year.
291. The Sharks apparently are the only animals that never get sick. They are immune to every type of disease including cancer.
292. The Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
293. The glass produced from recycled glass instead of raw materials reduces related air pollution by 20%, and water pollution by 50%.
294. Although a cow has no upper front teeth, it grazes up to 8 hours a day, taking in about 45 kg of feed and the equivalent of a bath tub full of water. A healthy cow gives about 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
295. The average life-span of a cow is 7 years. The oldest cow ever recorded was Big Bertha. She reached 48 in 1993. She also holds the record for producing 39 calves.
296. Cows release some 100 million tons of hydrocarbon annually – by releasing gas.
297. The human brains consists of more than 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) through which the brain’s commands are sent in the form of electric pulses. These pulses travel at more than 400 km/hr, creating enough electricity to power a light bulb. The brain consumes more energy than any other organ, burning up a whopping one-fifth of the food we take in.
298. The Danish flag, a white cross on a red ground, is the oldest national flag, and was introduced in 1219.
299. Sunlight does not penetrate more than 400 metres deep into the sea.
300. Any five digit number multiplied by 11 and then multiplied by 9091 will reappear twice in the product.
301. The sun burns 240, 000, 000 tonnes of hydrogen dust every minute.
302. Peanuts are used in the manufacture of dynamite.
303. The thirteen day of the month is more likely to fall on Friday than on any other day of the week.
304. At an altitude of 7,620 metres a pilot can see for a distance of 312 kilometres.
305. The only animal that sleeps on its back is man.
306. The sea bird albatross of Arctic region can fly all day and not flap its wings once.
307. The name of the first Test-Tube baby of the world is Louise Joy Brown.
308. The fastest creature of the world is the spine-tailed swift. It flies at a speed of 170 km per hour.
309. S. Venkataraghavan the former Indian cricket team’s skipper and umpire, led India in the first two World Cups in 1975 and 1979.
310. A farmer on the bank of Hood River, Oregon in USA produced an apple of 15 cm long and weighing 1 kg.
311. The female rhinoceros gives birth to its young ones after a pregnancy of 560 days.
312. The Kurinji plant which is found on the hillsides of South India bears flowers once in 12 years.
313. Sir Albert Einstein, the great scientist and mathematician of the world, failed in mathematics in the entrance examination of the Federal Polytechnic College of Zurich, Switzerland.
314. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
315. Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries.
316. The most commonly used letter in the alphabet is E.
317. The 3 most common languages in the world are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English.
318. The names of all continents both start and end with the same letter.
319. Cats spend 66% of their life asleep.
320. Switzerland eats the most chocolate equating to 10 kilos per person per year.
321. Sound travels almost 5 times faster underwater than in air.
322. Our brain uses between 20 - 25% of the oxygen we breathe.
323. The average human brain contains around 78% water.
324. In 1878 the first telephone directory was made with 50 names only.
325. If you try to say the alphabet without moving your lips or tongue every letter will sound the same.
326. 85% of plant life is found in the ocean.
327. When lightning strikes it can reach up to 30,000 degrees Celsius.
328. The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters.
329. On your birthday you share it with 9 million other persons around the world.
330. The only continent with no active volcanoes is Australia.
331. Australia was originally called New Holland.
332. Elephants are the only mammal that can’t jump.
333. Asthma affects one in fifteen children under the age of eighteen.
334. A one ounce milk chocolate bar has 6 mg of caffeine.
335. In 1810, Peter Durand invented the tin can for preserv- ing food.
336. In a day, kids in the U.S. that are between the ages of 2 - 8 spend 28 minutes of their time colouring.
337. A chicken with red earlobes produces brown eggs, and a chicken with white earlobes produces white eggs.
338. Not all polar bears hibernate; only pregnant female polar bears do.
339. There is a restaurant in Stockholm that only offers all-garlic products. They even have a garlic cheesecake.
340. A meteor has only destroyed one satellite, which was the European Space Agency’s Olympus in 1993.
341. The word “comet” comes from the Greek word “kometes” meaning long hair and referring to the tail.
342. The largest employer in the world is the Indian railway system in India, employing over 1.6 million people.
343. The Koala bear is not really a bear, but is really related to the kangaroo and the wombat.
344. The Flintstones cartoon was the first thirty-minute cartoon to be aired during prime time.
345. The abbreviation Xmas for the word Christmas is of Greek origin. Since the word for Christ in the Greek language is Xristos, which starts with the letter “X,” they started putting the X in place of Christ and came up with the short form for the word Christmas.
346. China has more English speakers than the United States.
347. Each year there are approximately 20 billion coconuts produced worldwide.
348. If all the blood vessels in our body were straightened out and placed end to end, they would be 1,00,000 miles long.
349. The water in the world’s oceans would fill a pipe 120.7 kms in diameter and 112.651kms high, stretching nearly one third of the way to the moon.
350. The most common disease in the world is tooth-decay.