FACTS

• At the 1st World Cup championship in Uruguay in 1930, the soccer balls that were used were actually monkey skulls wrapped in paper and leather.

• Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs has been tasted by archeologists and found edible.

• The largest living thing on the face of this Earth is an underground mushroom in Oregon. It measures three and a half miles in diameter.

• The biggest plane in the world is the six-engine Antonov AN-225 transport airplane. It can carry an aircraft on its back and cargo inside.

• Did you ever notice, that the name of all the continents ends with the same letter that they start with.

• The only part of the body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye. It takes in oxygen directly from the air.

• Colgate faced big obstacles in marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries. That’s because when translated Colgate means ‘go hang yourself’.

• All the planets in our solar system rotate anti-clockwise, except Venus. It is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

• Mercury is the fastest planet. It zooms around the Sun in just 88 days, at an incredible 107,000mph, faster than any space rocket.

• Amazing! Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, but its neighbour Venus is even hotter, because it has clouds to trap in the heat.

FACTS THAT THRILL THE MIND

• “One thousand” contains the letter A but none of the words from “one” to “nine hundred and ninety nine” have an A.

• “Forty” is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order. “One” is the only number with its letters in reverse alphabetical order.

• If you take any number between 1 and 9, and multiply it by 9, the sum of the resulting digits will always be 9. (Example 7x9=63; 6+3=9).

• The word four has four letters. In the English language there is no other number whose number of letters is equal to its value. Amazing!

• The word “therein” contains 13 words spelt using consecutive letters – the, he, her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, therein and herein.

• It takes 8 minutes for sunlight to travel from the Sun to the Earth! This means, if you see the sun go out, it actually went out 8 minutes ago.

• The use of excess electricity today is causing a shift in the Earth’s magnetic field. By 2327, the North Pole will be located in mid-Kansas.

• Amazing! The only 15 letter word that can be spelt without repeating a letter is “uncopyrightable”!

• It is believed that no piece of square dry paper can be folded more than 7 times in half!

• GADFY, written by Earnest Wright in 1939, is a 50,000+ word book, which does not contain a single word with ‘e’ in it.