Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (17 page)
• The propeller-driven Black Widow spy plane, designed to give ground troops a quick overview of a particular area, is—surprise!—about the size of your hand.
• The Wright brothers made a total of 105 flights.
• In the United States, there are an average of 240 collisions between airplanes and Canada geese every year.
• On April 18, 2000, 588 military and civilian parachutists from five nations jumped from seven aircraft flying at 12,000 feet over the Santa Cruz Air Base in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• In 2001 an unmanned solar-powered plane called the Helios Prototype achieved the highest altitude ever reached by a propeller-driven aircraft: 96,500 feet, over the island of Kauai.
• There are 13,387 airports in the United States.
• The Airbus A380 is the largest passenger aircraft ever built, with a wingspan of over 261 feet and a length of over 239 feet. It can carry 800 people.
• Iris Peterson, the oldest active flight attendant, is still flying for United Airlines at the age of 85. She was born in 1921 and joined the company in 1944.
• Hey, who’s eating all the candy? American adults eat 65% of the candy produced worldwide.
• How did Toblerone come up with that triangular shape? They based it on the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps.
• In some circles, licorice is called “sweet wood” or “Spanish juice.”
• The most popular candy in the Netherlands is a salty licorice candy called “Drop” (rhymes with “rope”).
• Back in 1953 it took 27 hours to make one Marshmallow Peep; nowadays it takes 6 minutes.
• President Ronald Reagan bought 12 tons of jellybeans during his eight years in office.
• Every year candy manufacturers make 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies.
• When the first 3 Musketeers Bars were introduced in 1932, the package included three small, individual bars—a vanilla, a chocolate, and a strawberry.
• Licorice was found in King Tut’s tomb.
• It takes an average of 252 licks to get to the chewy center of a Tootsie Roll Pop.
• Young gorillas like to play games like Follow the Leader and King of the Mountain.
• Gorillas share 98% of our genes, making them our second-closest relatives (chimpanzees share 99%).
• Gorillas laugh when they’re tickled and cry when they’re sad or hurt.
• There can be as many as 30 gorillas in a
troop
.
• Every gorilla troop has a leader, a large older male known as a “silverback” because of the gray-silver hair on his back. He makes every decision for the troop—and will protect it to the death.
• Gorillas support their weight on their knuckles when they walk on all fours (unlike monkeys, who use the palms of their hands).
• Adult male gorillas are about 5’6” when they stand up straight.
• Gorillas are mainly vegetarians, although insects make up 1-2% of their diet. They don’t seem to drink anything at all—observers think they get their water from the plants they eat.
• The mountain gorilla is an endangered species; fewer than 400 are left in the wild.
• The world’s oldest tree—a bristlecone pine in California called “Methuselah”—is 4,789 years old. Experts say it grows .00035 inches every 24 hours.
• What’s the tree most often used in street names? Is it elm? How about maple? Birch? Pine? No—it’s oak.
• There are 128 cubic feet in a cord of wood.
• The tallest tree in the world is a coast redwood (
Sequoia sempervirens
) that lives in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, California. It measures about 370 feet high.
• Sri Maha Bodhi, a sacred fig tree in Sri Lanka, is said to be a descendant of the Bodhi tree under which Buddha became enlightened. It was planted in 288 B.C., making it the oldest living human-planted tree in the world.
•
L’Arbre du Ténéré
(the Tree of Ténéré), an acacia tree in the Sahara desert, was once considered the most isolated tree on earth—more than 250 miles away from any other tree.
• The average Christmas tree in an American town square is 12 feet tall.
• “Dogwood” comes from “dagwood”—the tree’s slender, strong limbs were perfect for making “dags,” that is, daggers.
• Half of all journeys taken are less than two miles in distance.
• Around the world in…how many days? The record time by car: 33 days. By bicycle: 78 days.
• Special traffic lanes in the Netherlands are for bicycles only. They even have their own traffic lights.
• In 1870 it took about 29 hours to travel from New York to Chicago. Today it takes less than three.
• How fast does the average escalator travel? About .017 miles per hour.
• Laid end to end, all the roads in the United States would circle the Earth 153 times.
• The most miles ridden backward on a unicycle: 53.
• The average person in Great Britain travels a total of 36 miles by taxi each year.
• A bobsled’s top speed is about 90 miles per hour.
• One mile per hour equals 88 feet per minute.
• Things can get so hectic in Hong Kong that delivery times are influenced mostly by traffic conditions on elevators.
• The Japanese travel an average of 1,230 miles by railway per year. The British average 200.
• A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time: 1/100 of a second.
• If you watch TV for one hour a night between the ages of 6 and 16, you’ll have spent 8 months in front of the television.
• How long would it take to type every number from 1 to 1,000,000? It took Marva Drew of Iowa five years.
• The science of timekeeping is called
horology
.
• Back in 1878, Sir Sanford Fleming of Canada figured out that since the Earth rotates once every 24 hours and there are 360 degrees of longitude, there should be 24 worldwide time zones, each spaced 15 degrees of longitude apart. Simple, but brilliant!
• A queen bee lays one egg per minute.
• The part of a sundial that casts the shadow is called a
gnomon
, (pronounced NO-mun). Want to build a sundial? Here’s a tip: Use a compass to set the gnomon so it’s pointing north-south.
• There are 100 years in a
century
, 10 years in a
decade
, and 5 years in a
quinquennium
.
• Marching in “double time” is 180 steps per minute, “quick time” is 120 steps per minute, and “slow time” is 60 steps per minute.
• There are more than 750,000 words in the King James Bible.
• The Bible has been translated into 349 languages.
• Southpaws beware: There are 1,600 hostile references to left-handers in the Bible.
• The word “girl” appears only once in the King James Bible. (It’s in Joel 3:3.)
• According to folklore, the Adam’s apple is a reminder of man’s first sin—supposedly it’s a piece of the forbidden fruit stuck in the throat.
• How big was Noah’s ark? It was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall.
• The Bible contains some pretty long names, but the longest belongs to Isaiah’s son: Maher-shalal-hash-baz.
• In the Old Testament there’s a giant—a relative of Goliath—who has six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.
•
Bibliomancy
is the attempt to tell the future by opening a book (especially the Bible) to a random page and reading the first verse you see.
• Zacharias was struck dumb by God until he agreed to name his son “John.” That’s the John who later became John the Baptist.
…and not just in your pants
.
• There are more than 12,000 species of ants in the world.
• Ants don’t just come in black and red—they can also be green, brown, yellow, blue, or purple.
• Most ants are omnivorous—they eat everything… including other insects.
• Queen ants are born with wings. After they fly off to start new colonies, they lose their wings.
• Tropical leafcutter ants are farmers…sort of. They chew leaves to a pulp, then use the decaying leaf pulp to make fungus gardens, which they harvest for food.
• The perfect place for a picnic: There are no ants in Iceland, Greenland, or Antarctica.
• Ants hear with their knees and smell with their antennae.
• The social life of an ant colony is a lot like ours: There are carpenters, farmers, warriors, teachers, hunters, guards, nurses, undertakers, thieves—and even beggars.
• Ants depend on their colony for everything; a lone ant can’t survive on its own.
• Scientists think that ants probably evolved from wasps.
• Some American Indians have two names: a common name and a “power name,” which is kept private. Why? Because they believe that anyone who knows the private name can have power over them.
• Children in West Africa are commonly named for the day on which they were born. Monday is Adojoa, Tuesday is Abla, Wednesday is Aku, Thursday is Awo, Friday is Afua, Saturday is Ama, and Sunday is Awushie.
• The Ojibwa people of North America at one time considered it dangerous to speak the names of their own husbands or wives.
• Some Inuit take on new names when they become old, hoping the new name will give them new strength.
• Indonesians may change their names after suffering misfortune or illness. They believe a new name will confuse the evil spirits that brought them grief.
• Ancient Hawaiians thought that names contained
mana
, or power, and that the power in a name could shape a person’s character, personality, and destiny.
• Most traditional Jewish families in the U.S. name children after family members who have recently died. The parents hope that the child will have all the virtues of his or her namesake.
How much do you know about recycling?
• It takes 20 times less energy to make an aluminum can from recycled materials than from new materials… and a can made from recycled materials creates 95% less pollution than a new one does.
