The Mammoth Book of Useless Information. Noel Botham
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has never flown in a plane, and 28 per cent admits a fear of flying.
• The tallest sand dunes in the world are in the Sahara desert. The dunes have enough sand in them to bury the Great Pyramids of Egypt and the Eiffel Tower.
• Asia has the greatest number of working children, totalling 45 million. Africa is second, with 24 million.
• On some Pacific islands, shark teeth are used to make skin tattoos.
• The most-visited cemetery in the world is Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, in Paris. Established in 1805, it contains the tombs of over 1 million people, including: composer Chopin; singer Edith Piaf; writers Oscar Wilde, Molière, Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein; artists David, Delacroix, Pissarro, Seurat and Modigliani; actors Sarah Bernhardt, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand; and dancer Isadora Duncan. The most-visited tomb is that of The Doors’ former lead singer, Jim Morrison.
• In Japan, some restaurants serve smaller portions to women, even though the charge is the same as for a man’s portion.
• The Japanese cremate 93 per cent of their dead, compared with Great Britain, at 67 per cent, and the United States, at just over 12 per cent.
• Approximately one-third of Greenland, the world’s largest island, is national park.
• Kulang, China, runs seven centres for recycled toothpicks. People bringing used toothpicks to the recycling centres are paid the equivalent of 35 cents per pound weight.
• Floor-cleaning products in Venezuela have ten times the pine fragrance of British floor-cleaners, as Venezuelan women won’t buy a weaker fragrance. They wet-mop their tile floors twice a day, leaving windows and doors open so the scent can waft out to the street and send the message that their houses are clean.
• Windsor Castle is home to the ghosts of King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, King Charles I and King George III. Henry VIII is supposed to haunt the cloisters near the Deanery with ghostly groans and the sound of dragging footsteps.
• All education through to university level is free in the Eastern European nation of Azerbaijan.
• Canada is the largest importer of American cars.
• No one knows how many people live in Bhutan, a small independent kingdom on the slopes of the Himalayas. As of 1975, no census has ever been taken.
• On average, fifty-one cars a year overshoot and drive into the canals of Amsterdam.
• London cabbies estimate their average driving speed to be 9mph (14km/h) due to increasing traffic congestion.
• The area of Greater Tokyo – meaning the city, its port, Yokohama, and the suburban prefectures of Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa – contains less than 4 per cent of Japan’s land area, but fully one-quarter of its 123 million-plus people.
• Based on population, Chinese Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in the world. Spanish follows second, with English third and Bengali fourth.
• At about 200 million years old, the Atlantic Ocean is the youngest of the world’s oceans.
• In Finland, the awards for best children’s fairy tales by children are held on 18 October, known as Satu’s Day. The international competition for children ages 7 to 13 has been held since 1993, and its rules are translated into five languages.
• Britain is roughly nine times more densely populated than America, with 588 people per mile2 (227 people per km2) as compared with America’s 65 people per mile2 (25 people per km2).
• In China there are 600 bicycles for every car.
• At London’s Drury Lane Theatre, there have been numerous sightings of a ghost described as a soft-green glow, or a handsome young man. During renovation to the theatre in the late 1970s, workers found a skeleton wearing the remnants of a grey riding coat and with a knife sticking out of its ribs. The deceased was found to be a young ghost-hunter who was murdered in 1780.
• Among the tallest people in the world are the Tutsi from Rwanda and Burundi, in central Africa, with the men averaging 6ft (1.8m) in height.
• At 12,000ft (3,658m) above sea level, there is barely enough oxygen in La Paz, Bolivia, to support combustion. The city is nearly fireproof.
• Of the 15,000-odd known species of orchids in the world, 3,000 of them can be found in Brazil.
• Given one square metre per person, all the people in the world could fit on the Indonesian island of Bali, if they stood shoulder to shoulder.
• In a recent five-year period, twenty-four residents of Tokyo died while bowing to other people.
• Australia is home to 500 species of coral.
• A Chinese soap hit it big with consumers in Asia, with the bold claim that users would lose weight by washing with it. The soap was promptly banned.
• One in five people in the world’s population live in China.
• In Wales, there are more sheep than people. The human population for Wales is 2,921,000, while there are approximately 5,000,000 sheep.
• The country with the most post offices is India, with over 152,792.
• In Switzerland, when a male reaches 20 years of age he is required to undergo fifteen weeks of military training. Over the next few decades, he has to attend training camps until he has accrued 300 to 1,300 days of active service. Swiss men who live abroad don’t have to serve in the Swiss military, but they are required to pay 2 per cent of their income in the form of a military exemption tax. Men who don’t qualify for military service also pay the tax, but women aren’t required to pay the tax, nor are they expected to serve in the Swiss army.
• Ireland boasts the highest per capita consumption of cereal in the world – 15lb (6.8kg) per person annually.
• The popular American comic strip ‘Peanuts’ is known as ‘Radishes’ in Denmark.
• In Cupar, Scotland, in June of 1842, women hanging clothing on clothes-lines in an open area heard a sudden detonation, after which the clothes shot upwards into the air. Eventually, some of the clothing did fall back to the ground, but the rest kept ascending until it disappeared. Even odder, the clothes were carried off to the north, but chimney smoke in that area indicated that the wind was moving to the south.
• The country of Togo has the lowest crime rate in the world, with an average of just eleven reported crimes annually for every 100,000 of the population.
• The state bird of Texas is the mockingbird.
• Contrary to many reports, the Eisenhower Interstate System does not require that one mile in every five must be straight in the United States. The claim that these straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies does not exist in any federal legislation. Korea and Sweden do use some of their roads as military airstrips, though.
• There are more than 100 offences that carry the death penalty in Iran.
• Airborne sand from the Sahara desert has been picked up 2,000 miles (3,216km) over the ocean.
• With an exchange rate running at an average of 177,000 Ukrainian karbovanets to the US dollar, total assets of just $6 will qualify a person as a Ukrainian millionaire.
• The tallest, longest, fastest and greatest drop roller coaster in the world is the Daidarasaurus in Nagashima Spa Land, Japan. It is 8,133ft (2.479m) long, 318ft (97m) high, has a drop of 307ft (93.5m) and a top speed of 95mph (153km/h).
• Close to 72 per cent of Australia’s Aboriginals live in towns and cities.
• Over many centuries of living in the Arctic, Eskimos’ bodies have adapted to the cold. Eskimos tend to be short and squat, which brings their arms and legs closer to the heart,