1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (7 page)

Almost 2,000 carrot seeds

will fit into

a teaspoon.

An estimated 18 million spoons,

together weighing as much

as four blue whales,

go missing in Melbourne

every year.

Melbourne

used to be called

Batmania.

Alice,

the 3rd-largest town

in Australia’s Northern Territory,

used to be called

Stuart.

40% of all bottled water

sold in the world

is bottled tap water.

The Antarctic is a continent

entirely surrounded by oceans;

the Arctic is an ocean

almost entirely surrounded by continents.

The average American

absorbs 34
GB
of information a day,

though half of it is obtained

from playing

video games.

Half the Saxon aristocracy

were killed

at the battle of Hastings

in 1066.

More than twice as many people

are killed by vending machines

as by sharks.

Placebos are 30% more effective

as an antidote for depression

than drugs.

If a tree were planted

for each Coca-Cola sold,

we could reforest the Earth

in three years.

The inventor of ‘Best before’ dates,

originally for milk,

was Al Capone.

After his wife’s death,

a heart-broken Benjamin Disraeli

found that she’d kept all the hair

from the haircuts she’d given him

in 33 years of marriage.

Elizabeth Taylor

lived to be 79

but she never learned

to boil an egg.

The Perthshire village of Dull

is planning to twin with

Boring, Oregon.

More than 50% of koalas

have chlamydia.

Ants can survive

in a microwave:

they are small enough

to dodge the rays.

Anthophobia

is the fear of flowers.

The Greek national anthem

has 158 verses,

but only two of them

are ever sung.

The national anthem of Spain

has no words.

Prince Charles

is the longest-serving

heir to the throne in British history.

He has held the position

for 60 years.

Some parts of Antarctica

have had no rain or snow

for 2 million years.

Bubblewrap

was first produced in a

New Jersey garage in 1957.

Its inventors were trying to make

easy-wipe textured wallpaper.

There is no such thing

as a vegetarian snake.

Snakes eat nothing

except other animals.

For 249 years,

the tallest building in the world

was Lincoln Cathedral.

Angel Falls, Venezuela,

is 17 times higher

than Niagara.

A typical bird’s feathers

weigh more than

twice as much

as its bones.

Only 35%

of the average person’s

Twitter followers are

actual people.

‘Day dapple’ is an old Irish term

for the time of day when

a person can no longer

be distinguished

from a bush.

The ancient Greek for ostrich

is
strouthokamelo
s,

or ‘sparrow-camel’.

‘Influenza’

is Italian for ‘influence’:

heavenly bodies

were once thought

to affect our own.

San Marino has eight times

as many doctors per person

as any other country in the world.

Humans

have been hunter-gatherers

for 99% of their history.

Ostriches

can be trained

to herd sheep.

The French for ‘badger’

is
blaireau
,

which also means

‘shaving brush’.

WTF

is the acronym of the

World Taekwondo Federation.

In 2011,

the Internet reached

13.7 billion pages:

one for every year

since the Big Bang.

The entire Internet

weighs about the same

as one large

strawberry.

A male right whale

is half the size of a male blue whale

but has testes five times bigger:

each one weighs as much

as a large horse.

Ted Turner

owns 50,000 bison.

Kestrels

can locate voles from the sky

because of ultra-violet light

reflected by their urine.

Henry VIII had a Groom of the Stool

whose duty was to see that

‘the house of easement be sweet and clear’:

in other words,

to wipe the king’s bottom.

Sitting on the lavatory for eight hours

uses the same number of calories

as one hour’s jogging.

It was 33 years

after loo paper was invented

in Green Bay, Wisconsin,

that it could finally be advertised as

‘splinter free’.

Sudan

has more pyramids

than Egypt.

Steve Jobs was half Syrian.

His annual salary

as CEO of Apple

was $1.

‘Forty’

is the only number in English

that has its letters

in alphabetical order.

43 million

£1 coins

currently in circulation

are forgeries.

Since 2012,

all new 5p and 10p coins

issued by the Royal Mint

have been magnetic.

The highest-value notes

issued by the Bank of England are

Giants (
£
1 million) and

Titans (
£
100 million).

The chemical name for titin,

the world’s largest known protein,

is 189,819 letters long.

In Japan, Tintin is called Tantan

because Tintin

is pronounced ‘Chin-Chin’

and means ‘penis’.

Kim Il-Sung,

founder of North Korea,

was born on the day

the
Titanic
sank.

Kim Il-Sung’s grandson,

Jong-Nam, was sacked as heir

after being arrested trying to

enter Japan on a false passport

to visit Disneyland.

In the last 60 years,

more than 23,000 North Koreans

have defected to South Korea.

Only two Koreans

have gone in the opposite direction.

Korea

is Finnish for

‘gorgeous’.

The exchange rate in Vietnam is about

20,000 dongs to the dollar.

It costs the US mint

over 11 cents

to make each 5-cent coin.

‘Hey Jingo!’

is a conjuror’s call

for something to appear –

the opposite of

‘Hey Presto!’

which calls for it

to be gone.

Between 1917 and 1940,

the cure for patients with

syphilis

was to give them

malaria.

Gatwick,

the name of the UK’s

2nd-largest airport,

means ‘the farm where goats are kept’.

During the 2010 World Cup,

100 bar staff at the pub chain

Clover Taverns

changed their names to

Wayne Rooney.

The company has since gone bankrupt.

In 2007, Robert Stewart of Ayr

was put on the Sex Offenders Register

for having sex with a bicycle.

In 1993, Karl Watkins

of Redditch, Worcestershire,

was jailed for having sex

with pavements.

There is at least ten times

as much crime on TV

as there is in the real world.

Starbucks offers

87,000

different drinks combinations.

Britons eat 97%

of the world’s baked beans.

The last private resident

of 10 Downing Street

was called Mr Chicken.

Almost half of all Americans today

are classified as ‘living in poverty’ or

‘barely scraping by’.

46.4% pay no income tax.

The US has more lawyers per capita

than any country in the world

and twice as many prisoners

as lawyers.

The US has only 5%

of the world’s population,

but almost 25%

of its prison population.

Since smoking was banned in 2004,

the main currency in US prisons

is mackerel.

Prisoners waiting to be executed on

Death Row in America

are given a physical beforehand,

to ensure they are fit enough to die.

In his last week on Earth,

Troy Davis, who was executed

in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2011,

was put on ‘death watch’

to stop him taking his own life.

The Death House

at the State Prison

in Huntsville, Texas,

offers wheelchair access.

An estimated 150,000 people

die in the UK every year

because only 7% of Britons

know how to give first aid.

When a Navajo baby

laughs aloud for the first time,

the family throws a party.

The person who made the baby laugh

provides the food.

The air breathed by a single person

in an 80-year lifetime weighs more

than a fully laden Boeing 747.

1968

was the only year of the 20th century

in which no member

of the British armed services

was killed on active service.

The London Underground

has made more money from

its famous map

than it ever has from running trains.

In 2010, the Italian government

had a fleet of 629,000 official cars:

ten times as many

as the US government.

Since its discovery in 1930,

Pluto has travelled

only a third of its way

round the Sun.

Walter Schirra

is the only one

of the first six Americans in space

not to have one of the Tracy brothers

in
Thunderbirds

named after him.

Sucking a king’s nipples

was a gesture of submission

in ancient Ireland.

In Vanuatu pidgin,

Prince Charles is known as

nambawan pikinini blong Missus Kwin

and a helicopter is a

mixmaster blong Jesus Christ.

In 1995,

the number of TV programmes in Britain

watched by over 15 million people

was 225.

By 2004, this had fallen to six.

In Romany, the word for television

is
dínilo’s dikkaméngro
or

‘fool’s looking-box’.

In the film industry, a ‘mickey’

is a gentle camera move forwards.

It’s short for ‘Mickey Rooney’

(a ‘little creep’).

Bacteria and amoebas

are far more different

from each other

than amoebas

are from people.

Two-thirds of all the people in the world

who have ever lived to be 65

are still alive today.

There are 10,000 times

as many photographs

on Facebook

as there are in the

US Library of Congress.

Eight of the Earth’s 88

naturally occurring chemical elements

were discovered

in the same mine in Sweden.

The Malay word

for water is

‘air’.

Kummerspeck
(‘grief bacon’)

is German for the weight put on

from eating too much

when feeling sorry for yourself.