Registratio

n
Period
Stuff
 Compiled by

David Chatwin
 Amazing Facts & Figures
• No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.

• The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.

• Earth is the only planet not named after a pagan god.

• A Boeing 747’s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's

first flight.

• Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

• Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in

the morning.

• All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like

being seen wearing them in public.

• The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in

Renaissance Florence to shave them off.

• Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

• The inventor of the flushing toilet was Thomas Crapper.

• The average bed is home to over 6 billion dust mites.

• The average chocolate bar has 8 insect legs in it.

• Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than

left-handed people do.

• Every drop of seawater contains approximately 1 billion gold

atoms.

• The total combined weight of the world’s ant population is

heavier than the weight of the human population.

• Just about 3 people are born every second, and about 1.3333
people die every second. Almost 10 people more live on Earth
now, than when you started reading this…

• The number of people alive on earth right now is higher than

the number of all the people that have died. Ever.
• The average person consumes 1.2 pounds of spider eggs a
year and eats 2.5 pounds of insect parts a year.

• Scientists have determined that fungi are more closely related

to human beings and animals than to other plants.

• The largest living thing on the face of the Earth is a mushroom

growing underground in Oregon, it measures three and a half
miles in diameter.

• Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the
tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by
archaeologists and found to be edible.

• Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel called ‘Gadsby’ with over

50,000 words, none of which contained the letter "e."

• The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

• There was once a town in West Virginia, USA, called "6."

• Roman Emperor Caligula made his horse a senator.

• The green stuff you find on the occasional potato crisp is

chlorophyll.

• On an average work day, a typist's fingers travel 12.6 miles

(15.75 km).

• 2,500 left-handed people die each year using products

designed for right-handed people.

• Ten tons of space dust falls on the Earth every day.

• On average, a 4-year-old child asks 437 questions a day.

• Blue and white are the most common school colours.

• Every year the sun gets 360 million tons lighter.

• Napoleon was terrified of cats.

• The avocado is the most fattening fruit.

• The least intelligent domesticated animal is the turkey. The

most intelligent is the cat.

• Russia has the most movie theatres in the world.

• The ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2, should always be written as
QE2. QEII is the actual queen.

• The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning

to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."

• The pet ferret was domesticated more than 500 years before
the house cat.

• The world's record for continuous pogo stick jumping is 41

hours.

• The average person can live 11 days without water.

• The ampersand (&) was once a letter of the English alphabet.

• Coca-Cola was originally green.

• The Hawai'ian alphabet has 13 letters, A, E, I, O, U, H, K, L, M,

N, P, W, and ' (which is called an okina, or glottal stop).

• A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

• If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front

legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one
leg front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds
received in battle; if the horse has all 4 legs on the ground,
the person died of natural causes.

• The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for
each gallon of fuel that it burns.

• Because radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second and

sound waves saunter at 700 miles per hour, a broadcast voice
can be heard sooner 13,000 miles away than it can be heard
at the back of the room in which it originated.

• Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray

blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you’re
there.

• It has been recommended by dentists that a toothbrush be

kept at least 6 feet (two meters) away from a toilet to avoid
airborne particles resulting from the flush!

• In ancient Rome it was considered a sign of leadership to be

born with a crooked nose.
• The first known heart medicine was discovered in an English
garden. In 1799, physician John Ferriar noted the effect of
dried leaves of the common foxglove plant, digitalis purpurea,
on heart action. Still used in heart medications, digitalis slows
the pulse and increases the force of heart contractions and
the amount of blood pumped per heartbeat.

• Diet Coke was only invented in 1982.

• If you attempted to count to stars in a galaxy at a rate of one

every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them
all.

• The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime
waiting for the traffic light to change.

• Less than one per cent of the 500 Chinese cities have clean
air; respiratory disease is China's leading cause of death.

• The number of cars on the planet is increasing three times

faster than the population growth.

• The X's that people sometimes put at the end of letters or

notes to mean a kiss, actually started back in the 11th century
when Lords would sign their names at the end of documents
to other important people. It was originally a cross that they
would kiss after signing to signify that they were faithful to
God and their King. Over the years though, it slanted into the
X.

• The number of cars on the planet is increasing three times

faster than the population growth.

• Pearls melt in vinegar.

• A lion's roar can be heard from five miles away.

• Snails can sleep for 3 years without eating.

• Windmills always turn anti-clockwise - except for the windmills

in Ireland.

• Termites eat wood twice as fast when listening to heavy metal

music.

• About 8 million blood cells die in the human body every second,
and the same number are born each second.
 • Eighteen per cent of all global carbon dioxide emissions are
from cars.

• Every year, the Moon moves a further 3.82cm from the Earth.

• It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the

whole body.

• Hair is the fastest growing tissue in the body, second only to

bone marrow.

• Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he didn't

wear any pants.

Animal Facts
• Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
• Bulls are colour-blind.
• A cow's only sweat glands are in its nose.
• Mosquitoes have 47 teeth.
• The Poison Arrow frog has enough poison to kill 2,200 people.
• Emus can't walk backwards.
• A group of unicorns is called a blessing.
• A group of kangaroos is called a mob.
• A group of owls is called a parliament.
• A group of ravens is called a murder.
• A group of bears is called a sleuth.
• Twelve or more cows is called a flink.
• An elephant can be pregnant for up to 2 years
• A goldfish has a memory span of 3 seconds.
• A mule won't sink in quicksand but a donkey will.
• More people are killed annually by donkeys than in airplane
crashes.
• Animal breeders in Russia once claimed to have bred sheep
with blue wool.
• When a horned toad is angry, it squirts blood from its eyes.
• A scallop has 35 blue eyes.
• Zebras can't see the colour orange.
• It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs.
• A rat can go without water longer than a camel can.

Weird But True!

While sitting at your desk make clockwise circles in the air with your
right foot. While doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your
right hand.

Your foot will change direction!

More Amazing Facts

• Women blink twice as many times as men do.
• We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening.
Layers of cartilage in the joints get compressed during the
day.
• There are approx. 550 hairs in your eyebrow.
• The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
• Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.
• Babies are born without kneecaps. They appear when the
child is 2 to 6 years of age.
• You breathe about 10 million times a year.
• The colder the room you sleep in, the better the chances are
that you'll have a bad dream.
• The foot is the most common body part bitten by insects.
• The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger.
• The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.

Language Interesting Facts

• Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means "the capital" in
the Korean language.
• The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian
phrase "Shah Mat," which means, "The King is Dead".
• Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village".
• The longest non-medical word in the English language is
FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, which means "the act of
estimating something as worthless".
• The four words in the English language with the letters "uu"
are: vacuum, residuum, duumvir and continuum.
• 'Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'
 • There are no words in the English language that rhyme with
silver and orange.
• 'Zorro' means 'fox' in Spanish.

Tricky!
Have a go at reading this...

Can you raed tihs? Olny smoe plepoe can. I cdnuolt blveiee taht I
cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal
pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are,
the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the
rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it
whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed
ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh
and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬

Open a blank Word document and type the following:

=rand(200,99)

Press 'Enter' afterwards. Wait 5 seconds...

¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬

Quick Eye Exam...

Count the number of F's in the following text:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE

RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

There are six.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE

RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

Your brain most likely wasn't able to process the "F" in "OF".
Anyone who counts all six F's on the first go is a genius; three is
normal.

Tricky Questions

1.) Of those numbers whose English representation in capital letters

consists only of straight lines, only one number has a value equal to
the number of straight line segments required to write it out. What
number is this?

29 (TWENTY NINE)

2.) What words are pronounced differently when the first letter is a
capital?

Polish, Nice, Job.

3.) Everything Mr Red owns is red, he lives in a red bungalow and

his chairs are red, his tables are red. His ceiling, walls and floor are
all red. All of this clothes are red, his shoes are red, even his carpet,
television and phone are red. What colour is the carpet on his stairs?

He doesn’t have stairs; he lives in a bungalow.

4.) What is strange about this sentence?

Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Here’s an easier one…

No lemons, no melon.

They are palindromes. (See the section further on…)

 A Riddle by Lewis Carroll
John gave his brother James a box:
About it there were many locks.
James woke and said it gave him pain;
So gave it back to John again.
The box was not with lid supplied
Yet caused two lids to open wide:
And all these locks had never a key
What kind of box, then, could it be?

Answer:

As curly haired James was sleeping in bed,

His brother John gave him a blow on the head.
James opened his eyelids, and spying his brother,
Doubled his fists, and gave him another.
This kind of a box then is not so rare
The lids are the eyelids, the locks are the hair.

Light Switches
Three switches outside a windowless room are connected to three
light bulbs inside the room. How can you determine which switch is
connected to which bulb if you are only allowed to enter the room
once?

Answer:

Switch on the first switch, leave it for a minute, and then switch it
off again. Then switch on the second switch and enter the room. The
second switch will be connected to the light that is on, the first
switch will be connected to the light with the warm bulb, and the
third switch will be connected to the light with the cold bulb.
 Wetter as it Dries
What gets wetter as it dries?

Answer:

A towel.

Mistakes?
This sentense contains two mistakes. What are the
mistakes?

First mistake: The second s in the word sentense should be a c.

Second mistake: There is only one mistake in the sentence.

Double Code
In the following code, each symbol stands for two possible letters:

+ stands for I or A
* stands for B or W
= stands for C or T
& stands for E or K
? stands for L or H

The five-letter code word * ? + = & can be translated into two

English words, and each one means the opposite of the other. What
are the two words?

Answer: The two words are “black” and “white.”

STRATEGY: Make a word with the first choice, then look for a pattern
in the letters.

Cracking the Code

After school on Monday, Jody found this note in code taped to her
locker.

Yg ctg jcxkpi c uwtrtkug rctva hqt Ou. Dtqyp.

At first, she couldn’t figure it out. Then someone whispered in her
ear, “M stands for K.” Just that one clue helped Jody crack the code.
Can you crack the code, too? How?

Answer: The message reads, “We are having a surprise party for Ms.
Brown.” M stands for K tells you that the alphabet has shifted two
letters.

STRATEGY: Write the alphabet in a row, with a second alphabet

below it, starting with a below c. When you get to x in the second
row, go to the a in the top row and write y below it and z below b.

Anagram Rhyme
For each of the following four words, come up with another English
word that uses all THE SAME letters but in a different order. The four
words you come up with will rhyme with one another.

• ONSET
• NEWS
• WRONG
• HORNET

Answer:

• STONE
• SEWN
• GROWN
• THRONE

Animals in Hiding
There is an animal hiding in each sentence below. Can you find the
animals? Example: There's a bee in "I'll be eleven next month." Hint:
You'll have to look in three words to find some of the animals.

1. We can go at six o'clock.

2. It's nice to do good deeds.
3. Take soap and a towel.
4. Most rich people wear fancy clothes.
5. You can keep the watch or sell it.
6. Use a ladder.
7. It will be a rainy day.
8. I came late.
9. Tell me if I should start now.
10. Will a map help you?
1. goat
2. dog
3. panda
4. ostrich
5. horse
6. seal
7. bear
8. camel
9. fish
10. llama

Interesting Facts
• Did you know that you share your birthday with about nine
million other people around the world?

• Pearls are very pretty, but did you know it can take an oyster
seven years to make one?

• Did you know that king George I of England was German and
could not speak English, and that Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt,
was Greek?

• There are two things we cannot do - breathe and swallow at

the same time, and sneeze with our eyes open.

• The orchestra with the largest number of musicians came

from Norway, with a total of 20,000 members?

• Did you know that when Japanese General Nagoaka shaved of

his 19 inch moustache in 1933, it was given a special funeral
service?

• Take any four figures- e.g. 7694-reverse their order and

subtract them:
7694 - 4967 = 2727
Now add all the digits together and the answer will always
come to 9.
2+7+2+7=18
1+8=9
• Did you know that there are 639 muscles in the human body?
They contain six thousand million muscle fibres and each fibre
consists of 1000 separate minute threads called fibrils.

• Did you know that an albatross can glide for up to six days in
mid-air without beating its wings, and that it can take a nap
while doing so?

• Frogs have strong back legs for jumping. The biggest frog in
the world, the Goliath frog, is also the best high-jumper. It can
leap 3 metres into the air. In America, competitions are held
to find the best long-jumping frogs.

• The oldest tree in the world is a bristle-cone pine. One in

Arizona, United States is 4,600 years old. It was just a sapling
when the pyramids were being built, a tall tree when the
ancient Greeks and Persians were battling in the
Mediterranean, and was already old when Jesus was born.

• Arizona's Bristle cone pine is younger if compared with some

lichens. It is estimated that some lichens in the Antarctic may
be 10,000 years old. If it is right then these lichens started
growing during the Ice Age.

• Bamboo grows faster than any other plant. It can grow nearly
a metre (39.4 in) in one day - about the same as you grew in
the ten years after you were born.

• The driest desert is the Atacama Desert in northern Chile,

South America. Until 1971 it had had no rain at all for 400
years.

• The fastest flashes of lightning move at 140,000km per

second(87,000 miles per second) - fast enough to go three
times round the Equator in one second, but of course
lightning does not travel that far. The longest flashes of
lightning are about 30km (19 miles) from the ground.
 A Strange Sentence #1
Write the following sentence on the board and ask your pupils to
make sense of it:

Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.

Ensure them that it is a grammatically perfect statement.

If they are struggling, give them the following clues, one at a time:

1.) If it is a proper sentence then it must contain which part of

speech..?

2.) One of the words must be a verb.

3.) The word ‘dog’ must have a meaning as a verb.

4.) The meaning of the sentence can be made clearer by adding the
word ‘that’.

Ask the class to come up with other examples of similar sentences.

The trick, of course, is find animal names which can also be used as
verbs.

For example:

Apes apes ape ape apes.

Badgers badgers badger badger badgers.

 Bears bears bear bear bears.

Bugs bugs bug bug bugs.

Kids kids kid kid kids.

And a couple of slightly different ones…

Fleas fleas flee flee fleas. (Homophonic)

Geese geese goose goose geese. (Plural noun – and slightly rude!)

Yet More Amazing Facts

• The international telephone dialling code for Antarctica is 672.

• Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in

Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday
at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time
and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers
would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to
realize that this was the day of the changeover.

• More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air

crashes.

• Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only
have about ten.

• The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan."

• Frenchman Michel Lotito, known as Monsieur Mangetout,

specialises in eating glass and metal. His diet included
supermarket trolley, TV sets, aluminium skis, bicycles, beds,
plates, razor blades, a coffin, and even a Cessna 150 light
aircraft.

• Louis XIX was King of France from breakfast until tea-time on

2 August 1830, at which point he abdicated.

• Many men who acted as guards along the Great Wall of China
in the Middle Ages spent their whole lives there. They were
born there, raised there, they married there, died there, and
were even buried within the wall.
• The amount of junk mail that Americans receive in a day could
produce enough energy to heat a quarter of a million homes.

• The first puck used in ice hockey was a frozen piece of cow
dung.

• It is estimated that you’ll spend a year of your life looking for

lost objects.

• The average person spends two years of his or her life on the
phone.

• When asked to name a colour, three out of five people will say
red.

• On average, we spend 12 years of our life watching TV.

• There are 318,979,564,000 possible ways of playing the first

four moves in Chess?

• In some parts of Argentina the population speak Welsh.

• The average person will spend about 6 months on the toilet.

• The Ethiopian calendar has 13 months and the time system is

different to the rest of the world. 6 am is the start of the day.

• The decomposition time for a glass bottle is approximately 1

million years.

• Toronto's Yonge Street is the longest street in the world. It

runs 1,900 kilometres.

• The Vikings never wore horned helmets.

• Only 12 people have ever set foot on the Moon.

• The average person walks about 65,000 miles in a lifetime.

• The longest recorded flight by a paper aeroplane indoors is

20.9 seconds.

• Recycling one aluminium can saves enough energy to run a

TV for about three hours.

• Pinocchio means "pine eye" in Italian.

• Before the year 1000 AD, the word "she" did not exist in the
English language.

• The phrase "rule of thumb" comes from and old English law
which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything
wider than your thumb.

• The most difficult language to learn is Basque, spoken in

north-western Spain and south-western France.

• The three words that people misspelled most are

achievement, acquire, and accumulate.

• The origin of the word "bonfire" was from "bonefire," a fire in

which bones were burnt.

• The venom in a Daddy Long-Legs spider is more poisonous

than the venom of a Black Widow but they cannot bite
humans because their fangs are too short.

• Your system of blood vessels is over 60 000 miles long. That's

long enough to go around the world more than twice.

• To make one litre of honey you will need the nectar from
about 10 million flowers. A bee will produce only 1/12 of a
teaspoon of honey during her entire lifetime.

• You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV.

• Google receives about 200 million search queries each day.

During the heaviest traffic more than 2,000 search queries are
answered each second.

• The Greek national anthem has 158 verses.

• The longest word with only one vowel is strengths (9 letters),

packing six consonant sounds into a single syllable.

• In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed

frames by ropes...when you pulled on the ropes the mattress
tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. That's where
the phrase, "good night, sleep tight" came from.

• On average, 100 people choke to death on ball point pens

every year, so be careful.

• When you sneeze water can come out of your mouth at

speeds of 60mph (100km/h).
 • Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

Sevens
The 7 deadly sins are: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony,
lust.

The 7 virtues are: faith, hope, charity, fortitude, prudence, justice,

temperance.

The 7 dwarfs are: Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy,

Doc.

The 7 seas are: Red, Adriatic, Black, Caspian, Mediterranean,

Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean.

Palindromes

1. Never odd or even.

2. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.

3. Madam, I'm Adam.

4. Sit on a potato pan, Otis.

5. Go Hang a Salami, I'm a Lasagna Hog!

6. Was it a bat I saw?

7. Too Hot to Hoot.

8. Some men interpret nine memos.

9. Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron.

10. I saw desserts; I'd no lemons; alas, no melon.

Distressed was I.
 11. Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward
to new era?

12. Rats live on no evil star.

13. Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna.

14. Now sir, a war is never even sir, a war is won.

15. Did Bob poop? Bob did!

Thought Provoking Questions

• If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?

• If something horrific is described as horrible, why isn't

something terrific described as terrible?

• Why isn't 11 pronounced “onety-one”?

• Why does cleave mean both ‘to stick’ and ‘to separate’?

• What would happen if you were driving at the speed of light

and you turned your headlights on?

• If corn oil comes from corn, sunflower oil comes from

sunflowers and olive oil comes from olives, where does baby
oil come from?

• Why is the alphabet in that order?

• If nothing sticks to Teflon, then how do they make it stick to

the pan?
 • Where does your lap go when you stand up?

• You can be overwhelmed and underwhelmed, but can you be

simply whelmed?

• If a cannibal ate a clown, would it taste funny?

• If you try to fail, and you fail, have you succeeded or failed?

• They say, “A fool and his money are soon parted,” but how do
a fool and his money get together in the first place?

• Things are often referred to as ‘the best thing since sliced

bread’, but what was the best thing before sliced bread?

• What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

• If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to

drown too?

• In a country of ‘free speech’, why do we get phone bills?

• How do "Do Not Walk on the Grass" signs get there?

• If ‘All the World’s a Stage’, where is the audience sitting?

• If a rabbit's foot was actually lucky, wouldn't it still be

attached to the rabbit's leg?

A Strange Sentence #2
What's so peculiar about this sentence?

I do not know where family doctors acquired

illegibly perplexing handwriting;
nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical
intellectuality, counterbalancing
indecipherability, transcendentalizes
intercommunications' incomprehensibleness.

Answer:

Each word in the sentence is one letter longer than the word before
it.

Come up with some of your own – they don’t have to be very long…