Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (12 page)
Some real places in America
.
•
Deathball Rock, Oregon
, was named after an especially bad batch of biscuits.
•
Atlasta Creek, Alaska
. A local woman was so delighted that a building had been constructed in this remote area that she exclaimed, “At last, a house!” The name stuck.
•
Norwood, Massachusetts
. A local man christened the town “Norwood” because it “had a pleasing sound, was easy to write, and had no
i
to dot or
t
to cross.”
•
Matrimony Creek, North Carolina
, got its name from an unhappy surveyor who said the creek was irritatingly noisy—the same opinion he had of marriage.
•
Tesla, California’s
, founding fathers named the town for inventor Nikola Tesla in hopes that their proposed power plant would supply electricity to San Francisco and make them rich. The plant was never built, and Tesla is now a ghost town.
•
Hot Coffee, Mississippi
, as you might imagine, was named in honor of a roadside store that sold
really
good coffee.
•
Rego Park, New York
, was named for a local construction company called Rego—short for “real good.”
• Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, is the only town in the United States that has two dashes in its name.
• Bolivia was named after Colombian-born freedom fighter Simón Bolívar (full name: Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios y Blanco).
• Siberia means “sleeping land.”
• Thailand translates to “land of the free.”
• In 190 A.D., Roman emperor Commodus changed the name of Rome to Colonia Commodiana (Commodus’s Colony). After he was assassinated a year later, the Senate changed the name back to Rome.
• The Bronx, New York, was named for its first European settler, Jonas Bronck.
• Bangkok’s official Thai name is 167 letters long.
• Venezuela was named after Venice, Italy. The name literally means “Little Venice.”
• St. Paul, Minnesota, was originally called “Pig’s Eye,” which was the nickname of Pierre Parrant, the city’s first settler (and a notorious whiskey merchant).
• Istanbul, Turkey, was once called Constantinople after Roman emperor Constantine. But it was founded by Greeks who named it Byzantium…after King Byzas.
• …roll of toilet paper is 114.8 feet long.
• …human body has 29 feet of intestines.
• …person laughs 17 times a day.
• …American consumer spends $1,508 on clothes every year.
• …ratio of yellow kernels to white kernels in a bag of popcorn is 9 to 1.
• …Frenchman drinks 140 bottles of wine per year.
• …American uses about 100 gallons of water a day.
• …cat has 24 whiskers (12 on each side).
• …adult human body contains 28 pounds of carbon.
• …adult has approximately 45
billion
fat cells in his or her body.
• …whole chicken from the grocery store weighs 3 pounds, 12 ounces.
• …person has about 25 moles on their body.
• …iceberg weighs 20 tons.
• …water droplet contains 100 quintillion water molecules. (That’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000.)
• …American police officer will walk 1,632 miles on the job this year.
Sweet facts about bees and honey
.
• A honeybee will make only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime (about four months).
• Worker honeybees have the toughest job in the hive—gathering the nectar for the honey. To make just one pound of honey, they will fly more than 55,000 miles and visit two million flowers.
• Honeybees “dance” to communicate with each other. When a worker bee returns to the hive with nectar, it gives everyone a taste and then, through its dance, it tells the other bees the location, quantity, and quality of the nectar supply.
• Even though their wings beat very fast, honeybees fly only about 15 miles per hour.
• European colonists introduced the honeybee to North America in 1638. Native Americans called it “white man’s fly.”
• Aside from adding it as an ingredient in food or drinks, American colonists used honey to make cement, varnish, medicine, and furniture polish.
• Not only did ancient Egyptians use honey to sweeten their bread, but they also fed it to sacred animals.
• In the Middle Ages, German peasants sometimes paid their rent with honey and beeswax.
• Astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker has discovered 32 comets and approximately 300 asteroids.
• Every photograph of the first American atomic bomb detonation was taken by Harold Edgerton.
• Kevlar, the synthetic fiber used in bulletproof vests, was invented by chemist Stephanie Kwolek.
• In 1876, Maria Spelterina was the first woman to ever cross Niagara Falls on a high wire.
• Richard Pavelie solved the Rubik’s cube underwater with only five breaths of air.
• As of 2005, there were 37 taxi drivers in New York City named Amarjit Singh.
• Youngest TV host: 6-year-old Luis Tanner, host of TV’s
Cooking for Kids With Luis
.
• A Ukrainian monk, Dionysius Exiguus, created the modern-day Christian calendar.
• Russian pilot I. M. Chisov survived a 21,980-foot plunge from an airplane with no parachute. (He landed in three feet of snow, which cushioned his fall.)
• Louise J. Greenfarb of Las Vegas, Nevada, has 35,000 refrigerator magnets. She’s been collecting them since the 1970s.
• When you sneeze, your body ejects a lot—snot, spit, and pretty much anything else in your mouth and nose—at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour.
• Dung beetles gather poop into apple-size balls, and the females lay their eggs inside. After they hatch, the baby beetles eat their way out of it.
• If your head is chopped off, your brain will keep functioning for about 15 seconds!
• What, exactly, is snot? Mostly water, plus salt and chemicals that help it stay sticky. It may look similar to saliva, but it’s not; saliva comes from the salivary glands in your mouth.
• Earwax naturally dries up and forms little balls that drop out when we yawn, chew, or swallow.
• In 1973, folks near Dallas and Boston panicked when slime molds tried to take over their neighborhoods. Slime molds don’t move very fast, but they do move.
• Head-shrinking (displaying heads cut off in battle) probably dates back to 200 B.C. or earlier, and was common only in a few tribes in Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. The Jívaros, a tribe in the Amazon rain forest, used shrunken heads in victory celebrations and feasts—and then discarded them or let the kids use them as toys.
• At 555 feet tall, the Washington Monument is the tallest stone building in the world.
• Emperor Shah Jahan of India built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
• The Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state is the largest concrete structure in the world.
• When it was first built, Egypt’s Great Pyramid was 482 feet high, but erosion and settling have shrunk it by about 30 feet.
• When it was first built about 5,000 years ago, England’s Stonehenge monument had 30 upright stones. Today, only 16 are still standing.
• The tallest occupied building in Europe is London’s Canary Wharf, at 50 stories high.
• Remember the Alamo? The Texas fort was defended by 187 men, all of whom were killed in the battle.
• Armed with sledgehammers, the citizens of East and West Berlin began the destruction of the 26-mile-long Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The dismantling was taken over by the government and finished in November 1991.
• The Mason-Dixon line—the imaginary line that separates the northern U.S. from the southern U.S.—is 244 miles long.
Here are nine of the most dangerous snakes in the world
.
•
Fierce snake
(Australia): One bite from this killer contains enough venom to slaughter 100 people.
•
Brown snake
(Australia): One drop of its venom—as small as a grain of sand—can kill a human being.
•
Malayan krait
(Southeast Asia): 50% of the Malayan krait’s victims die, even if they’re treated.
•
Tiger snake
(Australia): This aggressive snake kills more people than any other Australian snake.
•
Saw-Scaled viper
(Africa): It kills more people than all other African snakes combined.
•
Boomslang
(Africa): Stand back! The boomslang has very long fangs and can open its mouth to a full 180°.
•
Coral snake
(United States): The coral snake has small fangs, but extremely potent venom. Though it has trouble penetrating clothing, it can easily puncture human skin.
•
Death adder
(Australia): One bite from this snake will paralyze you—and can kill you in six hours.
•
Beaked sea snake
(Asia): It’s responsible for more than half of all sea-snake bites. 90% of its victims die.
• To make the perfect boiled egg, make a pinprick in the round end of the shell
before
boiling, so the air can escape. (And be careful—don’t crack the egg.)
• Always cook pasta in plenty of boiling water so the pasta can move around as it cooks. That’s what prevents it from sticking together.
• Humans are the only creatures on Earth that cook their food.
• Why do onions make you cry? Blame it on the sulfur compounds in the onion—they make your eyes water while you’re chopping.
• Anti-crying trick: Stick out your tongue while you’re cutting onions. The moisture on your tongue will soak up the onion’s airborne chemicals before they hit your eyes.
• Cooked food is easier to digest than raw food.
