hearken the facts - x

A few facts that you might never come across, but your life will be incomplete without:

• A pound of houseflies contains more protein than a pound of beef.
• Russians generally answer the phone by saying, “I’m listening”.
• The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
• The 57 on Heinz ketchup bottle represents the varieties of pickles the company once had.
• You big toes have two bones each while the rest have three.
• More than 40,000 parasites and 250 types of bacteria are exchanged during a typical French kiss!
• Houseflies hum in the key of E.
• More people are allergic to cow’s milk than any other food.
• Sweden was the first country in the world to keep population statistics.
• Almost everyone who reads this will try to lick their elbow.
• A group of tigers is called a streak.
• King Louis XIX ruled France for 15 minutes.
• 1 pound of lemons contain more sugar than 1 pound of strawberries.
• India has more post offices than any other country.
• Sweden is the largest spender on ketchup.
• You skin is actually an organ.
• Luther Crowell invented the paper bag in 1867.
• Frozen lobsters can come back to life when thawed!
• The screwdriver was invented before the screw.
• The average person will drink about 16,000 gallons of water in his/her lifetime.
• In February 2004, Sweden led the world in Internet penetration, with 76.9 per cent of people connected to the Internet. The world average 11.1 per cent.
• Cats can hear ultrasound.
• You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
• Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
• A Holstein’s spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.
• Annually, the amount of garbage that is dumped in the world’s oceans is three times the weight of fish that is caught from the oceans.
• In the weightlessness of space a frozen pea will explode if it comes in contact with Pepsi.
• There are 35 million digestive glands in the stomach.
• Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic, and he often wrote backwards.
• The king of  hearts is the only king without a moustache.

hearken the facts - ix

A few facts that you might never come across, but your life will be incomplete without:

• There are 1,792 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
• At any one time, there are 100 million phone conversations going on in the United States.
• Frogs cannot swallow without blinking.
• Americans on the average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
• Texas is larger than France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Luxembourg combined.
• The chameleon has a tongue that is one and a half times the length of its body.
• 99% of all animal species that ever lived on Earth are now extinct.
• To melt away 1 pound of fat you will need to walk 34 miles.
• One in every 9000 people is an albino.
• The human eye blinks an average of 4,200,000 times a year.
• An ant can survive for up to two days underwater.
• The average Italian consumes half a pound of bread a day.
• Humans use a total of 72 different muscles in speech.
• One third of the land in the United States is owned by the government.
• The Blue Whale weighs as much as thirty elephants and is as long as three Greyhound buses.
• Nobel Prize resulted from a late change in the will of Alfred Nobel, who did not want to be remembered as a propagator of violence – he invented dynamite.
• Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.
• The oldest patented company logo is the red triangle of Bass beers!
• Most elephants weigh less than the tongue of a blue whale.
• 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
• The name jeep comes from GP, the army abbreviation for General Purpose.
• If your mouth was completely dry, you would not be able to distinguish the taste of anything.
• In the early 1960’s, Porsche commercially manufactured farm tractors.
• A tree in metropolitan area will survive about eight years.
• Drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79%, and one is 50% less likely to develop bladder cancer.
• Cats purr at about 26 cycles per second, the same frequency as an idling diesel engine.
• The blood of mammals is red, the blood of insects is yellow, and the blood of lobsters is blue.
• On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team on his sophomore year.
• One in ten people live on an island.

hearken the facts - viii

A few facts that you might never come across, but your life will be incomplete without:

• Henry Ford, father of the Automobile, is also the father of the charcoal briquette.
• Whales can never focus both their eyes on the same object at once.
• The gecko’s eyes are open all the time.
• An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
• A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.
• George Washington’s salary a year was $25,000.
• Bulls are colour-blind, therefore will usually charge at a matador’s waving cape no matter what colour it is – be it red or neon or yellow.
• Denmark has more than 600 castles and manor houses.
• You can use pinecones to forecast the weather – the scales will close when rain is on the way.
• The webbed feet of the stormy petrel enable it to walk on water. It spends almost its entire life over the ocean and only comes to land to breed. If a storm arises, they can’t walk on water and are forced to remain in the air all day and night.
• American Indians were the first to grow corns. They called it maize.
• More money is spent on gardening than on any other hobby!
• Racehorses can wear out new horse shoes in one race.
• Babies’ eyes do not produce tears until the baby is approximately six to eight weeks old.
• A mother hen turns over her egg about 50 times a day.
• Most people blink about 17,000 times a day.
• Turtles can breathe through their butts.
• Oysters can change from one gender to another and back again.
• A pineapple is a berry.
• The shortest English word that contains the letters A, B, C, D, E and F is feedback.
• US scientists calculated that Santa would have to visit 822 homes a second to deliver all the world’s presents on Christmas Eve, travelling at 650 miles a second.
• When the Titanic sank, 2228 people were on it. Only 706 survived.
• The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA.
• Alaska’s name comes from the Eskimo world Alakshak, meaning great lands or peninsula.
• Electricity doesn’t move through a wire but through a field around the wire.
• Research indicates that plants grow healthier when they are stroked.
• Americans spend about 90% of their time indoors.
• Saudi diplomats have 367 outstanding parking fines in Britain.
• To human taste buds, Zima is virtually indistinguishable from zebra urine.
• Seven Devils’ Peaks has Heaven’s Gate Lookout where you can see into four states