The Mammoth Book of Useless Information. Noel Botham

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      • The Scandinavian capital, Stockholm, is built on nine islands connected by bridges.

      • The Forth railway bridge in Scotland is a metre (33in) longer in summer than in winter, due to thermal expansion.

      • In the Andes, time is often measured by how long it takes to smoke a cigarette.

      • Until the 18th century, India produced almost all the world’s diamonds.

      • The Earth’s magnetic field is not permanent.

      • On 30 March 1867, Alaska was officially purchased from Russia for about 2 cents an acre. At the time, many politicians believed this purchase of ‘wasteland to be a costly folly’.

      • During winter, the skating rinks in Moscow cover more than 2,690,980ft² (250,000m²) of land.

      • As the Pacific plate moves under its coast, the North Island of New Zealand is getting larger.

      • Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.

      • If you travel from east to west across the Soviet Union, you will cross seven time zones.

      • Sahara means ‘desert’ in Arabic.

      • On 15 January 1867, there was a severe frost in London, and over forty people died in Regent’s Park when the ice broke on the main lake and they fell into the freezing waters.

      • The water in the Dead Sea is so salty that it is far easier to float than to drown in it.

      • The state flag of Alaska was designed by a 13-year-old boy.

      • Lightning strikes the Earth about 200 times a second.

      • Very hard rain would pour down at the rate of about 20mph (32km/h).

      • Discounting Australia, which is generally regarded as a continental land mass, the world’s largest island is Greenland.

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