The Mammoth Book of Useless Information. Noel Botham
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their food faster to stay warm. Their veins and arteries are also arranged to carry more warming blood to their hands.
• The full name for Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is the third longest country name in the world.
• Greenland ranks as the country with the highest percentage of smoking teenagers, with 56 per cent of 15-year-old boys and 45 per cent of 15-year-old girls smoking a cigarette daily.
• The country of Yemen has the world’s highest fertility rate (average number of births per woman), at 7.6, while Switzerland has the world’s lowest, at 1.5.
• Studies show that Chinese babies cry less and are more easily consoled than American babies.
• The Gulf Stream carries about 30 billion gallons (136 billion litres) of water every second – six times as much water as all the rivers in the world.
• Roughly 40 per cent of the population of the underdeveloped world is under 15 years old.
• London Heathrow Airport is the busiest international airport in the world, typically handling over 68 million international passengers a year.
• In terms of beer consumption, Britain is ranked seventh in the world, with the average Brit drinking 180 pints a year. The heaviest drinkers are in the Czech Republic, each consuming 281 pints a year on average.
• Japan overtook Sweden as the world’s most geriatric nation in 2005.
• Japan is also the largest harvester of seafood in the world, taking 15 per cent of the world’s total catch.
• When T.E. Lawrence returned from Arabia, he tried to become anonymous, often using the false names Ross and Shaw.
• In Thailand, the bodies of monks are preserved, once deceased, and placed on public display. However, thanks to an atmosphere of smog, humidity and heat, these corpses still retain teeth, hair and skin decades after their deaths, even though no special techniques are used to preserve the bodies.
• Throughout the South Pacific, no building is taller than the tallest palm tree.
• According to legend, visitors who wish to return to Rome must throw a coin into the city’s Trevi fountain.
• Per capita, the Irish eat more chocolate than Americans, Swedes, Danes, French and Italians.
• Portugal was the first European country to start building its overseas empire.
• There are castles on the River Rhine in Germany called the Cat and Mouse castles.
• Munich has a chiming clock on its medieval town hall with two tiers of dancing and jousting figures that emerge twice daily.
• The Parthenon, in Athens, is built in the Doric style of architecture.
• Stockholm is known as the ‘Venice of the North’.
• More than 1,000 languages are spoken in Africa.
• Shanghai, China, is sometimes called ‘the Paris of the East’ and ‘the Whore of China’.
• The Spanish Steps are actually in Rome.
• There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.
• Nearly half the population of Alaska live in one city, Anchorage.
• The Ainu are the aboriginal people of Japan.
• The women of the Tiwi tribe in the South Pacific are married at birth.
• The bulk of the island of Tenerife is the volcanic mountain, Mount Teide.
• The Canary Islands were once known as Blessed or Fortunate Isles.
• Mount Aso, in Japan, is the world’s largest volcanic crater.
• Approximately one quarter of the world’s population is Chinese.
• Denmark has the oldest flag in the world.
• China has the most borders with other countries.
• Polish people use zloty (‘golden’) as currency.
• The Romany people were wrongly thought to have come from Egypt, earning them the nickname ‘gypsies’.
• Zaire was formerly known as the Belgian Congo.
• Nicaragua is the largest and most sparsely populated state in Central America.
• Colombia’s largest export is cocaine.
• ‘Himalayas’ means ‘abode of snow’.
• The Karakoram mountain range is known as the ‘roof of the world’.
• Venice consists of 118 islands linked by 400 bridges.
• France is sometimes called the ‘Hexagon’ because it is roughly six-sided.
• Socrates taught Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle.
• Prime Minister William Gladstone’s middle name was Ewart.
• Ronald Reagan was a sports commentator before becoming a Hollywood actor.
• Reagan once advertised Chesterfield cigarettes.
• Four American presidents were assassinated while in office: Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield and Kennedy.
• Linus Pauling is the only man ever to win two individual Nobel prizes; one for peace, the other for chemistry.
• In the 1969 Sydney to Hobart race, British Prime Minister Edward Heath captained the winning team in the yacht Morning Cloud.
• President Lincoln’s advisor during the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, was born a slave.
• American astronaut John Glenn became a US senator in 1974 but was unsuccessful in his bid to become a Democratic presidential candidate.
• John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president of the United States.
• Robin Hood became a titled gentleman called the Earl of Huntingdon.
• A fellow prison inmate killed the American serial sex murderer Jeffrey Dahmer in 1994.
• JFK is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.
• Nathuran Godse assassinated Gandhi in 1948.
• Malcolm X’s daughter, Qubilah Bahiyah Shabazz, was charged with allegedly hiring a hitman to kill the leader of Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.
• When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon in 1969, Michael Collins was left behind in the command module.
• John F. Kennedy represented Massachusetts as senator.
• Stella Rimington was the first woman to head MI5.
• Ronald Reagan’s Scottish terriers were called Scotch and Soda.
• The Tibetan mountain people use yak’s milk as their form of currency.
• Spain literally means ‘the land of rabbits’.
• Little pools of unfrozen water can sometimes be found underneath the great icy plains of the Antarctic.
• Ten per cent of the salt mined in the world each year is used to de-ice the roads in the USA.
• The Spanish Inquisition once condemned the entire Netherlands to death for heresy.
• The River Nile has frozen over only twice in living memory – once in the 9th century and again in the 11th century.
• The Angel Falls in Venezuela are nearly twenty times taller than Niagara Falls.
• Dirty snow melts more quickly than clean snow.
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