1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off

Page 1, Position 0: "Asteroid 1
Page 1, Position 2: The ozone layer smells faintly of geraniums.: The Sunday Telegraph 8 December 2002
Page 1, Position 3: The centre of the galaxy tastes like raspberries.: The centre of the galaxy also tastes of rum.; http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/21/space-raspberries-amino-acids-astrobiology
Page 1, Position 4: The universe is shaped like a vuvuzela.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4879-big-bang-glow-hints-at-funnelshaped-universe.html; The Universe is also bent a bit like a Pringle, according to a theory that has recently emerged from Germany.
Page 2, Position 1: Light travels 18 million times faster than rain.: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/aberration.html
Page 2, Position 2: The Queen is the legal owner of one-sixth of the Earth’s land surface.: http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2011/03/land-queen-world-australia
Page 2, Position 3: The name of the first human being in Norse mythology is Ask.: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/38755/Askr-and-Embla
Page 2, Position 4: Everybody expected the Spanish Inquisition – they were legally obliged to give 30 days’ notice.: http://catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0075.html
Page 3, Position 1: Octopuses have three hearts.: http://animal.discovery.com/invertebrates/octopus/
Page 3, Position 2: Kangaroos have three vaginas.: Female kangaroos' vaginas consist of one opening with three branches. The question of 'what denotes a vagina' is still argued late into the night by The QI Elves.; http://news.discovery.com/human/dnews-nuggets-120417.html
Page 3, Position 3: Three of Fidel Castro’s sons, Alexis, Alexander and Alejandro, are named after Alexander the Great.: The New Yorker, 31 July 2006
Page 3, Position 4: The opening lines of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat are: ‘There were four of us.’: The fourth character in Three Men in a Boat is, of course, Montmorency the dog.; http://www.authorama.com/three-men-in-a-boat-1.html
Page 4, Position 1: 40% of the human race did not survive beyond its 1st birthday.: http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf"http://www.scribd.com/doc/102731480/Population
Page 4, Position 2: One in ten European babies is conceived in an IKEA bed.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/interiorsandshopping/8052996/Ikea-an-empire-built-on-self-assembly.html
Page 4, Position 3: The human heart pumps enough blood in a lifetime to fill three supertankers.: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/heart/heartfacts.html
Page 4, Position 4: The word ‘time’ is the most commonly used noun in English.: http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/100freqused07.htm
Page 5, Position 1: 10% of all the photographs in the world were taken in the last 12 months.: http://blog.1000memories.com/94-number-of-photos-ever-taken-digital-and-analog-in-shoebox
Page 5, Position 2: Between 1838 and 1960, more than half the photos taken were of babies.: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/facebook-stores-10000x-more-photos-than-the-library-of-congress-20110920/
Page 5, Position 3: The words written on Twitter every day would fill a 10-million-page book.: http://blog.twitter.com/2011/06/200-million-tweets-per-day.html
Page 5, Position 4: In 2008, a man in Ohio was arrested for having sex with a picnic table.: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,343031,00.html
Page 6, Position 1: The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the world in a lifetime.: http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/high-arch/news-and-features.html
Page 6, Position 2: The world’s population spends 500,000 hours a day typing Internet security codes.: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html?_r=0
Page 6, Position 3: The first book ever printed in Oxford had a misprint on the first page: they got the date wrong.: Henry Robert Plomer, A Short History of English Printing 1476-1900 (1927) p. 17.
Page 6, Position 4: For 100 years, the flag of the tropical Turks and Caicos Islands in the West Indies mistakenly featured an igloo.: http://flagspot.net/flags/tc_his.html
Page 7, Position 1: One third of Russians believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth.: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/02/11/science-us-russia-poll-education-science-idUKTRE71A5B920110211
Page 7, Position 2: 46% of American adults believe that the world is less than 10,000 years old.: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/americans-believe-in-creationism_n_1571127.html
Page 7, Position 3: 46% of American adults can’t read well enough to understand the label on their prescription medicine.: http://www.dictionaryproject.org/resources/education-statistics
Page 7, Position 4: At least 75% of convicted criminals are unable to read or write.: http://www.dyslexic.org.uk/aboutdyslexia15.htm
Page 8, Position 1: Beyoncé Knowles is an 8th cousin, four times removed, of Gustav Mahler.: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3795389/Beyonces-classy-genes-revealed.html
Page 8, Position 2: Shostakovich wrote his 8th Symphony in a henhouse.: Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (2005) p. 138.
Page 8, Position 3: Argentina is the 8th-largest country with the 8th-largest Jewish population.: http://jcpa.org/cjc/vp-400-rubin.htm"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Argentina
Page 8, Position 4: 8th January 1835 is the only day in history that the USA had no national debt.: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/15/135423586/when-the-u-s-paid-off-the-entire-national-debt-and-why-it-didnt-last
Page 9, Position 1: Italy’s biggest business is the Mafia. It turns over $178 billion a year and accounts for 7% of GDP.: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/at-178-billion-mafia-is-italy-s-biggest-business-165827
Page 9, Position 2: George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein had their shoes hand-made by the same Italian shoemaker.: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/155283/The-strangest-sole-mates.html
Page 9, Position 3: The designer of Saddam’s bunker was the grandson of the woman who built Hitler’s bunker.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4642916.stm
Page 9, Position 4: Churchill’s secret bunker was in Neasden. It was so horrible he only went there once.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1932976.stm
Page 10, Position 1: In his first year at Harrow, Winston Churchill was bottom of the whole school.: http://www.brianmicklethwait.com/education/archives/000839.htm
Page 10, Position 2: The Irish poet Brendan Behan became an alcoholic at the age of eight.: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/58657/Brendan-Behan
Page 10, Position 3: Leonardo da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa for 15 years. By the time he died in 1519, he still didn’t consider it finished.: Most of Leonardo's work was never finished - he was famous for leaving things unfinished - and, in his own eyes, none of it was. As he said himself: 'Art is never finished, only abandoned.'; http://www.authenticsociety.com/about/MonaLisa
Page 10, Position 4: When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, one of the suspects was Picasso.: http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/mona_lisa/mlevel_2/mlevel2_picasso.html
Page 11, Position 1: Most diamonds are at least 3 billion years old.: http://www.sdnhm.org/archive/exhibits/diamonds/facts.html
Page 11, Position 2: There are enough diamonds in existence to give everyone on the planet a cupful.: http://www.diamondreview.com/tutorials/diamonds
Page 11, Position 3: A burning candle creates 1.5 million tiny diamonds per second.: Unfortunately the nano-diamonds created by a candle burn away almost as quickly as they are created.; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/candles-shine-new-light-on-diamonds-2339499.html
Page 11, Position 4: Under extreme high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6244778.stm
Page 12, Position 1: The US tax code is four times as long as the complete works of Shakespeare.: http://bigthink.com/how-to-think-like-shakespeare/us-tax-code-is-four-times-longer-than-shakespeares-complete-works-not-as-good
Page 12, Position 2: Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh and King Charles I all had pierced ears.: Shakespeare and Raleigh's piercings can be seen in their portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London.; The story of King Charles I's pearl earring: http://twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/king-with-pearl-earring.html
Page 12, Position 3: An ‘earworm’ is a song that gets stuck in your head.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17105759
Page 12, Position 4: Over 100 billion neutrinos pass unnoticed through your head every second.: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-09/baffling-cern-results-show-neutrinos-moving-faster-speed-light
Page 13, Position 1: IKEA is the world’s 3rd-largest user of wood and sells 2 billion Swedish meatballs a year.: http://www.theecologist.org/green_green_living/behind_the_label/1098324/behind_the_brand_ikea.html"http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/deborah-ross-im-sorry-there-really-is-no-alternative-to-billy-bookshelves-7670602.html
Page 13, Position 2: In Afghanistan and Iraq it takes 250,000 bullets (three tons of ammunition) to kill each insurgent.: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/us-forced-to-import-bullets-from-israel-as-troops-use-250000-for-every-rebel-killed-15050027.html
Page 13, Position 3: More Falklands veterans have committed suicide since the war than were killed during it.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1758301.stm
Page 13, Position 4: A language dies every 14 days.: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/enduring-voices/
Page 14, Position 1: The world’s largest pearl weighs 14 pounds.: http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1939_11_pick.html
Page 14, Position 2: On average, American doctors interrupt their patients within 14 seconds.: http://www.ted.com/speakers/abraham_verghese.html
Page 14, Position 3: There are over 14 billion light bulbs in the world but fewer than 14 million Jews.: http://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_wireless_data_from_every_light_bulb.html"http://www.jewfaq.org/populatn.htm
Page 14, Position 4: People earning over £14,000 a year are the richest 4% on the planet.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11950843
Page 15, Position 1: There are eight times as many atoms in a teaspoonful of water as there are teaspoonfuls of water in the Atlantic.: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(atoms+in+1tsp+water)/((how+much+water+in+atlantic+ocean)+in+teaspoons)
Page 15, Position 2: There are more living organisms in a teaspoonful of soil than there are people on Earth, and a billion times more in a tonne than there are stars in the Milky Way.: http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/concepts/soil_biology/bacteria.html
Page 15, Position 3: Charles Darwin calculated that English soil contained 50,000 worms an acre.: http://www.wormdigest.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=310&Itemid=2
Page 15, Position 4: In 1999, Darlington FC acquired 50,000 worms to irrigate their waterlogged pitch. They all drowned.: http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/archive/2000/06/28/The+North+East+Archive/7136611.Bird_scarers_don_t_give_a_hoot/
Page 16, Position 1: Three and a half Olympic swimming pools could hold all the gold ever mined in the world.: http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/investing-strategy/2009/11/20/the-only-asset-worth-owning-today.aspx
Page 16, Position 2: In 2011, Birds Eye sold 225 billion frozen peas: enough to fill 40 Olympic swimming pools.: http://www.permira.com/site/report/44/44.pdf
Page 16, Position 3: If all the Birds Eye waffles sold in a year were stacked up, they would be 474 times higher than Mount Everest.: http://www.permira.com/site/report/44/44.pdf
Page 16, Position 4: Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, was a professional beekeeper. When filling in forms, he always gave his occupation as ‘apiarist’.: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Beekeeper-conquered-Mount-Everest-3231871.php
Page 17, Position 1: The 10,000 trillion ants in the world weigh about the same as all the human beings.: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/08/army-ants/moffett-text/2
Page 17, Position 2: If the 5 trillion spiders in the Netherlands took to eating humans rather than insects, they’d consume all 16.7 million Dutch people in just three days.: http://ednieuw.home.xs4all.nl/Spiders/InfoNed/The_spider.html
Page 17, Position 3: Alfred Kinsey, author of Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), had a collection of 5 million wasps and could insert a toothbrush into his penis, bristle-end first.: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=157174&sectioncode=6
Page 17, Position 4: Biologically speaking, ‘bugs’ are insects that suck.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Hemiptera
Page 18, Position 1: Biologists cannot agree on definitions for the words ‘species’, ‘organism’ or ‘life’.: http://www.biologyreference.com/Se-T/Species.html#b"http://www.eebweb.arizona.edu/grads/mherron/publications/BR_08.pdf"http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/344/defining-life
Page 18, Position 2: Behavioural biologists do not agree on what constitutes ‘behaviour’.: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347209001730
Page 18, Position 3: Psychologists cannot agree on what ‘personality’ means.: http://theconversation.edu.au/why-workplaces-must-resist-the-cult-of-personality-testing-5540
Page 18, Position 4: Anthropologists cannot agree on the meaning of the word ‘culture’ or on the meaning of the word ‘meaning’.: http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/A_Cognitive_Theory_of_Cultural_Meaning.html?id=tyhdo9R0cDcC&redir_esc=y
Page 19, Position 1: Abulia n. The inability to make decisions.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 19, Position 2: Astasia n. The inability to stand up.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 19, Position 3: Aprosexia n. The inability to concentrate on anything.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 19, Position 4: Apodysophilia n. A feverish desire to rip one’s clothes off.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 20, Position 1: If all the Lego bricks ever manufactured were clipped on top of each other, they would make a tower ten times as high as the distance to the Moon.: http://club.lego.com/en-gb/CreativeCorner/AskMaxArchive.aspx?cat=Bricks&showpage=1
Page 20, Position 2: Liechtenstein, the world’s 6th-smallest country, is the world’s largest exporter of false teeth.: Liechtenstein may be the top exporter at the moment, but keep an eye on that ever-expanding Chinese false teeth industry.; http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article491700.ece
Page 20, Position 3: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, having all your teeth removed and replaced with false ones was a popular 21st-birthday present.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/smile-a-perfect-smile-but-dont-laugh--we-have-officially-lost-our-dentures-1336158.html
Page 20, Position 4: The road signs of the Austrian village of Fucking are set in concrete to deter thieves.: http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/austria.asp
Page 21, Position 1: London, with a population of over 8,000,000, is not a city, though the City of London, with a population of about 7,000, is.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13841482
Page 21, Position 2: According to the Forestry Commission, London is ‘the largest urban forest in the world’.: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/leafy-london-gets-official-forest-status-656045.html
Page 21, Position 3: In 1894, The Times estimated that by 1950 London would be nine feet deep in horse manure.: http://www.gfdrr.org/gfdrr/sites/gfdrr.org/files/4.Ian%20Noble_DRR%20and%20CCA.pdf
Page 21, Position 4: The Roman name for Paris was Lutetia, which translates into English as ‘Slough’.: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Slough"http://www.athenapub.com/14roman-paris.htm
Page 22, Position 1: In 1811, nearly a quarter of all the women in Britain were named Mary.: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n18/james-davidson/flat-nose-stocky-and-beautugly
Page 22, Position 2: In 1881, there were only six men in Britain called Derek.: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/stories/22.html
Page 22, Position 3: Only 4 Clives, 13 Trevors and 15 Keiths were born in the UK in 2011.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19247787
Page 22, Position 4: Naughty racehorse names that managed to escape the Jockey Club censor include Hoof Hearted, Peony’s Envy, Wear The Fox Hat and Sofa Can Fast.: http://horseracing.about.com/od/breeding/a/aanameingtb.htm
Page 23, Position 1: In 2012, the Advertising Standards Authority ordered a Northampton-based furniture store to stop advertising its prices as ‘Sofa King Low’.: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4162238/Sofa-King-Low-advert-is-banned.html
Page 23, Position 2: Caterpillars make no noises other than chewing – though Phengaris rebeli strums its bottom like a guitar.: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/05/tricky-caterpillars-impersonate-queen-ants-to-get-worker-ant-protection/
Page 23, Position 3: Every year, Peruvians eat more than 60 million guinea pigs.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/2439745/Guinea-pig-festival-in-Peru.html?image=6
Page 23, Position 4: In Switzerland, it is illegal to keep just one guinea pig.: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hope-for-lonely-rodents-rent-a-guinea-pig-service-takes-off-in-switzerland-a-787336.html
Page 24, Position 1: 98% of British homes have carpeted floors. In Italy, only 2% do.: http://www.healthyflooring.org/report01.html
Page 24, Position 2: In Japan only 2% of adoptions are of children; 98% are adult males aged 25 to 30.: http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/09/the-church-of-scionology-why-adult-adoption-is-key-to-the-success-of-japanese-family-firms/
Page 24, Position 3: It’s unsafe for travellers to rely on ‘St Christopher’ any more: he was removed from the calendar of saints in 1969.: The Church had a saint cull in 1969 to remove the ones who probably never existed.; http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=36
Page 24, Position 4: 10% of US electricity is made from dismantled Soviet atomic bombs.: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/business/energy-environment/10nukes.html
Page 25, Position 1: Until 1913, children in America could legally be sent by parcel post.: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2584174182/
Page 25, Position 2: There are 5.9 calories in the glue of a British postage stamp.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1680,00.html
Page 25, Position 3: All the batteries on Earth store just ten minutes of the world’s electricity needs.: http://energy.aol.com/2011/11/21/all-the-batteries-on-earth-store-just-10-mins-of-world-electrici/
Page 25, Position 4: Ancient Greek democracy lasted for only 185 years.: http://www.fountainmagazine.com/Issue/detail/building-an-ethical-and-shared-future-september-october-2012
Page 26, Position 1: The ancient Greeks had no word for religion.: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/classics/modules/level6/6AACHI17.aspx
Page 26, Position 2: China is the world’s largest supplier of Bibles: one factory in Nanjing prints a million a month.: http://www.christiantoday.co.uk/article/nanjing.china.becomes.bible.printing.capital.of.the.world/18520.htm
Page 26, Position 3: The dialling code for Russia is 007.: http://www.tellows.co.uk/countryprefix/7/Russia
Page 26, Position 4: Collectively speaking, humans have spent longer playing World of Warcraft than they have existed as a species separate from chimpanzees (5.93 million years).: http://www.examiner.com/article/world-of-warcraft-5-93-million-years-of-wasted-time
Page 27, Position 1: Charette n. An intense flurry of activity to finish something by a deadline.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 27, Position 2: Muntin n. The thin strip of wood or metal that divides the panes of glass in a window.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 27, Position 3: Nikhedonia (n.) The pleasurable anticipation of success before any actual work has been done.: http://www.wordnik.com/words/nikhedonia
Page 27, Position 4: Smout (n.) A small, unimportant Scottish person.: http://caledonianmercury.com/2012/07/25/useful-scots-word-smout/0034880
Page 28, Position 1: John Cleese’s father’s surname was Cheese. Cleese grew up ten miles from Cheddar and his best friend at school was called Barney Butter.: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/john-cleeses-towering-legacy-20091021
Page 28, Position 2: Digestive biscuits have no particular digestive qualities. In the USA it is illegal to sell them under that name.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3304963/Country-notebook-the-digestive-biscuit.html
Page 28, Position 3: In 2010, the BBC spent nearly £230,000 on tea, but only £2,000 on biscuits.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8480967/BBC-spends-230000-a-year-on-teabags.html
Page 28, Position 4: Caffeine is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen: the same as cocaine, thalidomide, nylon, TNT and heroin.: http://www.chemteam.info/Mole/Empirical-MolecFormulas.html
Page 29, Position 1: The same man invented heroin and aspirin in the same year: Felix Hoffman, 1897.: http://opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html
Page 29, Position 2: Heroin was originally marketed as cough medicine.: http://opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html
Page 29, Position 3: Worldwide sales of cocaine earn more than Microsoft, McDonald’s and Kellogg’s combined.: New Scientist, 23 June 2001
Page 29, Position 4: More than 7,000 Americans die each year and 1,500,000 are injured as a result of doctors’ bad handwriting.: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1578074,00.html
Page 30, Position 1: Fewer than 5% of blind or visually impaired people in the UK can read Braille.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00szzq4
Page 30, Position 2: Attempting to swim the Channel from France has been illegal for 19 years.: http://www.dft.gov.uk/mca/mcga07-home/emergencyresponse/mcga-searchandrescue/mcga-theroleofhmcoasguard/mcga_-_hm_coastguard_-_the_dover_strait.htm
Page 30, Position 3: The water-flow of the Ganges is a state secret in India.: http://www.sandrp.in/floods/HT_Paper_1106.pdf
Page 30, Position 4: In 2012, Apple Inc. had more cash in the bank than the US government.: http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/apple-has-more-cash-in-the-bank-than-the-u-s-treasury-has-left-to-spend-20110729/
Page 31, Position 1: In 2012, 20% of the world’s top 20 snooker players were colour-blind.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-1173761/Alan-Fraser-The-Review--Snookered-red-brown.html
Page 31, Position 2: If you scaled a snooker ball up to the size of the Earth, it would have mountains three times higher than anything on the planet.: http://www.curiouser.co.uk/facts/smooth_earth.htm
Page 31, Position 3: In 1903, its first year of trading, Gillette sold just 168 razor blades.: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/233768/King-Camp-Gillette
Page 31, Position 4: The first advertising jingles were written down in newspapers; readers were expected to sing them themselves.: http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40608
Page 32, Position 1: There are more than three times as many PR people in America as there are journalists.: http://www.intersectionofonlineandoffline.com/journalism-vacuum-filled-by-pr-professionals-or-spin-doctors/
Page 32, Position 2: The Nazis made it illegal on pain of death for apes to give the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0ff82c8e-9516-11e0-a648-00144feab49a.html
Page 32, Position 3: All but one of the ravens at the Tower of London died from stress during the Blitz.: Bloody Tales Of The Tower, National Geographic Channel (http://natgeotv.com/uk/bloody-tales-of-the-tower)
Page 32, Position 4: British spies stopped using semen as invisible ink because it began to smell if it wasn’t fresh.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8015180/MI6-used-bodily-fluids-as-invisible-ink.html
Page 33, Position 1: Because Tonto means ‘stupid’ in Spanish, when The Lone Ranger was shown in Latin America, he was called Toro, ‘bull’.: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/971/in-the-old-lone-ranger-series-what-did-kemosabe-mean
Page 33, Position 2: Florence Green, the last veteran of the First World War, died in February 2012. Asked what it was like to be 110, she replied, ‘Not much different to being 109.’: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-02-07/britian-world-war-veteran-dies/52997384/1
Page 33, Position 3: On her 120th birthday, Jeanne Calment (1875–1997) the oldest person ever recorded, said, ‘I only have one wrinkle and I’m sitting on it.’: http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~wang/calment.html
Page 33, Position 4: The UK retail industry makes £250 million a year from gift cards that no one redeems.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17644528
Page 34, Position 1: In the 12th century, the Danish army consisted of seven men.: Helge Seidelin Jacobsen, An outline history of Denmark (2000) p. 19.
Page 34, Position 2: In the 17th century, the salary of the Governor of Barbados was paid in sugar.: Anonymous, Antigua and the Antiguans: A Full Account of the Colony and its Inhabitants (2011) p. 38.
Page 34, Position 3: In the 18th century, the French navy buried their dead in the ship’s hold.: http://www.exeterflotilla.org/history_misc/nav_customs/nc_customs.html
Page 34, Position 4: In the 19th century, tobacco was used for ‘rectal inflation’: blowing smoke up the anus to resuscitate the drowned.: The Independent, August 21, 1994
Page 35, Position 1: Cardiff has more hours of sunlight than Milan.: http://www.glam.ac.uk/location/cardiff
Page 35, Position 2: Glasgow is twinned with Nuremberg, Bethlehem and Havana.: http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/AboutGlasgow/Factsheets/Glasgow/InternationalLinks.htm
Page 35, Position 3: Toasters were banned in Havana until 2008.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7295714.stm
Page 35, Position 4: The Dyslexia Research Centre is in Reading.: http://www.dyslexic.org.uk/testimonial.htm
Page 36, Position 1: The technology behind smartphones relies on up to 250,000 separate patents.: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/technology/apple-samsung-case-shows-smartphone-as-lawsuit-magnet.html
Page 36, Position 2: The human brain takes in 11 million bits of information every second, but is only aware of 40.: http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/a-presentation-to-the-ohio-courts-of-appeals/
Page 36, Position 3: The water in a blue whale’s mouth weighs as much as its entire body.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9265000/9265623.stm
Page 36, Position 4: The ancient Romans discovered parrots could speak and taught them to say ‘Hail Caesar’. When they got bored with this, they took to eating them instead.: The Sunday Telegraph, 18 March 2007
Page 37, Position 1: The United States of America maintains a military presence in 148 of the 192 United Nations countries.: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/14/ron-paul/ron-paul-says-us-has-military-personnel-130-nation/
Page 37, Position 2: On average, every square mile of sea on the planet contains 46,000 pieces of rubbish.: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/waste-and-recycling/news-north-pacific-gyre-100-million-tons-garbage-and-growing
Page 37, Position 3: In 1251, Henry III was given a polar bear by the king of Norway. He kept it in the Tower of London, on a long chain so that it could swim in the Thames.: http://www.hrp.org.uk/TowerofLondon/Stories/Palacehighlights/RoyalBeasts/Stories
Page 37, Position 4: The tadpoles of the South American paradoxical frog are larger than the frog itself.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7270714.stm
Page 38, Position 1: Historical Catholic clergy include: Bishop Boil, Bishop Boom, Bishop Broccoli, Bishop Bolognese, Bishop Busti, Bishop Butt and Bishop Bishop.: http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/lab15.html
Page 38, Position 2: Kuku kaki kakak kakak ku kayak kuku kaki kakek kakek ku is an Indonesian tongue-twister meaning ‘My sisters’ toenails looked like my grandfathers’.’: http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/in.htm
Page 38, Position 3: In the 2009 Formula One season, 12% of Grand Prix drivers were called Sebastian.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Formula_One_season
Page 38, Position 4: People in Victorian Britain who couldn’t afford chimney sweeps dropped live geese down their chimneys instead.: Harold H. Schobert, Energy and Society: An Introduction (2002) p. 72.
Page 39, Position 1: You are three times more likely to die in a plane crash than you are to be eaten by a mountain lion.: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/reduce-your-chances-of-dying-in-a-plane-crash/
Page 39, Position 2: Gerbils can smell adrenaline but trials in airports showed they couldn’t tell the difference between terrorists and people who were scared of flying.: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/1388-an-m15-mole-or-gerbil
Page 39, Position 3: If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side.: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=would-you-fall-all-the-wa
Page 39, Position 4: A medium-sized cumulus cloud weighs about the same as 80 elephants.: http://www.metro.co.uk/lifestyle/897977-gavin-pretor-pinney-the-cloud-appreciation-society-started-as-a-joke
Page 40, Position 1: Fred Baur (1918–2002), the designer of the Pringles can, had his ashes buried in one.: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1811730,00.html
Page 40, Position 2: Fred is Swedish for ‘peace’.: http://mymemory.translated.net/t/Swedish/English/fred
Page 40, Position 3: Nobles present at the 8th-century battle of Bravalla between Sweden and Denmark included Hothbrodd the Furious, Thorulf the Thick, Birvil the Pale, Roldar Toe-Joint, Vati the Doubter, Od the Englishman, Alf the Proud and Frosti Bowl.: Saxo, The History of the Danes, Vols 1 - 2 (1979) p. 239.
Page 40, Position 4: The Queen of England is related to Vlad the Impaler.: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20127044-10391698/vlad-the-impaler-how-is-prince-charles-queen-elizabeth-related-to-him/
Page 41, Position 1: When customers visited the first supermarkets in the UK, they were afraid to pick up goods from the shelves in case they were told off.: Co-operative News, 18 March 2008
Page 41, Position 2: Women buy 80% of everything that is for sale.: http://www.she-conomy.com/facts-on-women
Page 41, Position 3: Between 1928 and 1948, 12 Olympic medals were awarded for Town Planning.: http://urbantimes.co/2012/08/town-planning-an-olympic-event/
Page 41, Position 4: On a clear, moonless night the human eye can detect a match being struck 50 miles away.: Alphonse Chapanie, Man-Machine Engineering (1965) p. 35.
Page 42, Position 1: In the US between 1983 and 2000, there were 568 plane crashes. 51,207 of the 53,487 people aboard got out alive: a survival rate of 96%.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5402342.stm
Page 42, Position 2: Harry Houdini could pick up pins with his eyelashes and thread a needle with his toes.: Jeremy Beadle, Jeremy Beadle's Today's the day: a Chronicle of the Curious (1979) p. 199.
Page 42, Position 3: The Sami people of northern Finland use a measure called Poronkusema: the distance a reindeer can walk before needing to urinate.: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poronkusema
Page 42, Position 4: The Inca measurement of time was based on how long it took to boil a potato.: http://www.potatoes.com/potatokids-history.cfm
Page 43, Position 1: Potatoes were illegal in France between 1748 and 1772.: Christopher Stocks, Forgotten Fruits: The stories behind Britain's traditional fruit and vegetables (2009) p. 173.
Page 43, Position 2: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) liked to eat fruit while it was still attached to the tree.: Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (2006)
Page 43, Position 3: Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the great Victorian actor-manager, once hailed a taxi and got in. Absorbed in his work, he sat silently reading in the back. When the cabbie eventually asked, ‘Where to, guv?’ Sir Herbert spluttered, ‘Do you really think I would give my address to the likes of you?’: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5212455
Page 43, Position 4: On average, most people have fewer friends than their friends have. This is known as the ‘friendship paradox’.: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200911/why-your-friends-have-more-friends-you-do
Page 44, Position 1: Blissom vb To bleat with sexual desire.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 44, Position 2: Eye-servant n. One who only works when the boss is watching.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 44, Position 3: Hemipygic adj. Having only one buttock; half-arsed.: George Stone Saussy III, Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Words"(1996) p. 118.
Page 44, Position 4: Marmalise vb To give someone a thrashing.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 45, Position 1: The modern world’s first international sporting fixture was a cricket match played in 1844 between Canada and the USA. Canada won by 23 runs.: http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/current/match/318995.html
Page 45, Position 2: Baseball – the name and the game – was invented in England in the 1750s.: http://www.tradgames.org.uk/games/rounders.htm
Page 45, Position 3: Baseball legend Babe Ruth always wore a cabbage leaf under his cap to keep his head cool. In South Korea, this is considered unsporting, unless the player has a doctor’s note.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4117856.stm
Page 45, Position 4: ‘Soccer’ is not an Americanism. It’s short for ‘Association Football’ and was popularised by Charles Wreford-Brown, captain of the English national team 1894–5.: http://www.ouafc.com/varsity/players/92
Page 46, Position 1: James Naismith, a Canadian, invented basketball in Massachusetts in 1891. It was 21 years before it occurred to anyone to cut a hole in the bottom of the basket.: http://www.east-buc.k12.ia.us/99_00/PK/jn.htm
Page 46, Position 2: Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame was the first man to use the word ‘awning’.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 46, Position 3: Aerosmith have made more money from Guitar Hero than from any of their albums.: http://www.1up.com/news/aerosmith-money-guitar-hero-albums
Page 46, Position 4: When Matt Smith became the 11th Doctor Who in 2010, UK bow-tie sales doubled in a month.: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100167128/thanks-to-doctor-who-bow-ties-are-back-but-will-good-taste-and-chivalry-follow/
Page 47, Position 1: 98% of the 7 billion billion billion atoms in the human body are replaced every year.: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11893583
Page 47, Position 2: Mongolia’s largest airport is named after Genghis Khan. He had over 500 wives and a vast number of children: 1 in 10 people in Central Asia today are his direct descendants.: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_genghis.html
Page 47, Position 3: Anophthalmus hitleri is a blind beetle found only in five caves in Slovenia. Named after Hitler in 1933, it is now endangered due to collectors of Nazi memorabilia.: http://rosegeorge.com/site/a-beetle-called-hitler
Page 47, Position 4: Hitler’s home phone number was listed in Who’s Who until 1945. It was Berlin 11 6191.: http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1946apr13-00011
Page 48, Position 1: At least 99% of all the species that ever existed have left no trace in the fossil record.: http://www.donaldprothero.com/files/47440594.pdf
Page 48, Position 2: No scientific experiment has ever been done (or could be done) to prove that time exists.: Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where do the Laws of Physics Come From? (2006) p. 311.
Page 48, Position 3: If you could fold a piece of paper 51 times, its thickness would exceed the distance from here to the Sun.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jun/22/comment.tvandradio
Page 48, Position 4: Charles Blondin crossed Niagara Falls several times on a 1,000-foot tightrope: blindfolded, in a sack, on stilts, carrying a man on his back and cooking an omelette in the middle.: http://www.theatrehistory.com/french/blondin001.html
Page 49, Position 1: Michael J. Fox’s middle name is Andrew.: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000150/bio
Page 49, Position 2: Emile Heskey’s middle name is Ivanhoe.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2002/feb/14/theknowledge.sport2
Page 49, Position 3: David Frost’s middle name is Paradine.: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/910501/Sir-David-Frost
Page 49, Position 4: Richard Gere’s middle name is Tiffany.: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000152/bio
Page 50, Position 1: 1 in 50 Americans executed for murder had the middle name ‘Wayne’.: http://www.newsoftheweird.com/wayne.html
Page 50, Position 2: 1 in 50 Scots are heroin addicts.: http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/2341638/Audit-Scotland-report-reveals-drink-and-drugs-cost-Scotland-5billion-a-year.html
Page 50, Position 3: 1 in 50 Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens.: http://www.examiner.com/article/ufo-video-this-week-alien-disclosure-imminent
Page 50, Position 4: 1 in 50 words in the lyrics of the winning entries of the Eurovision Song Contest is ‘love’.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8625718.stm
Page 51, Position 1: More people go to church on Sunday in China than in the whole of Europe.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14838749
Page 51, Position 2: The lead singer of Iron Maiden has a day job as a Boeing 757 pilot.: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/11/1031608274025.html
Page 51, Position 3: A greetings card that can play ‘Happy Birthday’ has more computing power than existed in the whole world in 1950.: http://ec.europa.eu/research/rtdinfo/special_ms/news_en.html
Page 51, Position 4: You are 14% more likely to die on your birthday than any other day.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18626157
Page 52, Position 1: Oranges and lemons smell different due to chemically identical molecules that are mirror images of each other. An orange is really just a left-handed lemon.: http://americanhistory.si.edu/kids/molecule/04exp.htm
Page 52, Position 2: Moon dust smells like gunpowder.: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/30jan_smellofmoondust/
Page 52, Position 3: A typical microwave oven uses more electricity keeping its digital clock on standby than it does heating food.: http://www.economist.com/node/5571582
Page 52, Position 4: As it grows, sweetcorn makes a squeaking noise like two balloons rubbing against each other.: http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/story.php?did=159172
Page 53, Position 1: Emissions from car exhausts are responsible for more deaths every year than road accidents.: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/air-pollution-deaths-united-kingdom-0420.html
Page 53, Position 2: You can legally buy cannabis in the US, but only as birdseed: the feathers of birds that eat it acquire a particularly glossy sheen.: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/03/us/bird-food-is-a-casualty-of-the-war-on-drugs.html
Page 53, Position 3: Fidel Castro estimated that he saved ten working days a year by not bothering to shave.: http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/-/434746/676886/-/15jc6ohz/-/index.html
Page 53, Position 4: Wild Bill Hickok’s brother Lorenzo was nicknamed ‘Tame Bill Hickok’.: http://www.kansasheritage.org/gunfighters/JBH.html
Page 54, Position 1: From 1912 to 1948, painting was an Olympic event. In 1924, Jack Yeats, brother of the poet W. B. Yeats, took the silver: Ireland’s first-ever Olympic medal.: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2012/0727/1224320880745.html
Page 54, Position 2: William Blake’s one-man exhibition of paintings in 1809 received only one review. The critic described him as a lunatic.: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/william-blake-the-art-of-a-lunatic-1674647.html
Page 54, Position 3: In 1891, Claude Monet won 100,000 francs in the French national lottery.: http://www.ledgersentinel.com/article.asp?a=3947
Page 54, Position 4: Pigeons can tell the difference between impressionist paintings by Monet and cubist works by Picasso. They can even tell when the Monets are hung upside down.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1334394/
Page 55, Position 1: There are no cubes in Cubism. Cézanne’s theory was that everything could be broken down into cylinders, spheres and cones.: Philip S. Rawson, Drawing (1987) p. 161
Page 55, Position 2: Tour de France riders need to eat the equivalent of 27 cheeseburgers a day.: Asker E. Jeukendrup, High-Performance Cycling (2002) p. 147
Page 55, Position 3: Lightning strikes the Earth 8.6 million times a day or about 100 times a second.: http://www.weather.com/encyclopedia/thunder/light.html
Page 55, Position 4: A single bolt of lightning contains enough energy to cook 100,000 pieces of toast.: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/1061/
Page 56, Position 1: Bovril was originally called ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef’.: http://local.stv.tv/edinburgh/181680-scottish-inventor-of-bovril-honoured-with-exhibition/
Page 56, Position 2: Hovis was originally called ‘Smith’s Patent Germ Bread’.: http://www.hampshiremills.org/Snippets%20hovis.htm
Page 56, Position 3: 7-Up was originally called ‘Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda’.: http://www.7up.com/page/history/
Page 56, Position 4: The Bank of America was originally called the Bank of Italy.: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/giannini_hi.html
Page 57, Position 1: Reducing the voting age to 18, the introduction of 24-hour licensing and passports for pets were all policies initiated by the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/371236.stm
Page 57, Position 2: The smallest known dinosaur was about four inches tall and weighed less than a chihuahua.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/6397345/Tiny-dinosaur-discovered.html
Page 57, Position 3: Each year, drug baron Pablo Escobar had to write off 10% of his cash holdings because of rats nibbling away at his huge stash of bank notes.: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-drug-dealer-pablos-escobars-abandoned-island
Page 57, Position 4: The first-ever edition of the Daily Mirror came with a free mirror.: Bill Deedes and Roger Hargreaves, Daily Encounters: Photographs from Fleet Street (2007) p. 18.
Page 58, Position 1: After two weeks of wear a pair of jeans will have grown a 1,000-strong colony of bacteria on the front, 1,500–2,500 on the back and 10,000 on the crotch.: http://www.research.ualberta.ca/en/VP%20Research%20News/2011/01/Jeansremainsurprisinglycleanafterayearofwear.aspx
Page 58, Position 2: If all the salt in the sea were spread evenly over the land, it would be 500 feet thick.: Eureka Magazine (The Times) July 2011
Page 58, Position 3: The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 was the loudest sound in recorded history. It was heard 3,000 miles away in Mauritius.: http://www.edu.pe.ca/kish/Grassroots/nature/Krakatoa.htm
Page 58, Position 4: Summer on Neptune lasts for 40 years, but the temperature is minus 200°C.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3736-hubble-captures-neptunes-changing-seasons.html
Page 59, Position 1: Summer nights in the Faroe Islands are so well illuminated that between May and July the lighthouses are turned off.: John Frederick West, Faroe: The Emergence of a Nation (1972) p. 3.
Page 59, Position 2: In the 1st century ad most ships in the northern hemisphere only sailed between May and September.: Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (2003) p. 87.
Page 59, Position 3: William Carstares (1649–1715) was the last man in Britain to be given the thumbscrew. As torture was illegal in England, he had to be taken to Edinburgh.: http://www.scotlandspeoplehub.gov.uk/famous/examples/c-d.html
Page 59, Position 4: Mussolini tortured his enemies by forcing them to swallow massive doses of castor oil.: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/965/did-mussolini-use-castor-oil-as-an-instrument-of-torture
Page 60, Position 1: The second-largest lake in Bolivia is called Lake Poopó. It’s not a freshwater lake.: http://countrystudies.us/bolivia/26.htm
Page 60, Position 2: The whole of Shakespeare contains only about 20,000 different words – less than half the vocabulary of the average English speaker today.: http://www.davidcrystal.com/DC_articles/Shakespeare51.pdf
Page 60, Position 3: The whole of Liechtenstein can be rented for $70,000 a night, for a minimum of two nights. It sleeps 900.: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-04/15/liechtenstein-airbnb
Page 60, Position 4: St Vitus is the patron saint of oversleeping.: http://www.culturalcatholic.com/SaintVitus.htm
Page 61, Position 1: The International Space Station is as roomy as a five-bedroom house and travels at 17,500 mph.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/24/international-space-station-nasa-astronauts
Page 61, Position 2: A marshmallow travelling at sea level would not begin to melt from friction caused by air resistance until it reached Mach 1.6 (1,218 mph).: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/iq1f6/how_fast_would_a_marshmallow_have_to_be_flying_at/c25qpec
Page 61, Position 3: When a medium in a trance offered to answer any question, Groucho Marx asked, ‘What’s the capital of North Dakota?’: David Bruce, The Funniest People in Comedy and Relationships: 500 Anecdotes (2006) p. 24.
Page 61, Position 4: The popular Los Angeles beverage Original New York Express Iced Coffee is made in a factory in Singapore.: http://www.weiku.com/products/7199588/Coffee_drinks.html
Page 62, Position 1: Cameroon is home to the Eton tribe. The Eton word for ‘thank you’ is abumgang.: http://www.geocities.com/gaulle99/eton.html
Page 62, Position 2: Arabic words are written right to left, but Arabic numbers left to right. Arabic speakers reading anything with a lot of numbers in have to read in both directions at once.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/arabic/guide/alphabet.shtml
Page 62, Position 3: In 2010, the Catholic Church had an income of $97 billion.: http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html
Page 62, Position 4: Trombone is French for ‘paperclip’.: http://translate.google.com/#fr/en/trombone
Page 63, Position 1: The word ‘gas’ was invented by the Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644). He also invented the word blas but it didn’t catch on.: http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/65/6/916.full
Page 63, Position 2: The word ‘gasoline’ doesn’t come from ‘gas’. It comes from Cazeline – after John Cassell, founder of the publisher Cassell & Co., who was the first to sell it commercially.: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/04/the-origin-of-gasoline/
Page 63, Position 3: Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) invented the thesaurus and the slide rule.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/roget_peter_mark.shtml
Page 63, Position 4: Edwin Beard Budding (1775–1846) invented the lawnmower and the adjustable spanner.: http://www.parksandgardens.ac.uk/component/option,com_parksandgardens/task,person/id,2182/Itemid,293/
Page 64, Position 1: In 1928, the Solomon Islands pidgin for ‘adjustable spanner’ was spanner he go walkabout and a ‘saw’ was this fella pull-him-he-come-push-him-he-go brother belong axe.: Mark Sebba, Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (1997) p. 116.
Page 64, Position 2: The Zulu for ‘Jack-in-a-Box’ is udoli ohlala ebokisini ukuthi ufuna ukusabisa abantu abaningi.: http://kerimiller.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/my-favourite-isizulu-word-of-all-time/
Page 64, Position 3: The Malay for ‘slate’ is sejenis batu berwarna kelabu kebiru-biruan yang selalu digunakan sebagai atap ruman.: QI's first Malay-English Dictionary which has sadly now been lost; or perhaps lent and never returned. If we lent it to you, please give it back!
Page 64, Position 4: Wanklank is Dutch for a discordant noise.: http://www.interglot.com/dictionary/nl/en/translate/wanklank
Page 65, Position 1: In 2010, Ghana banned the sale of second-hand underpants.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11845851
Page 65, Position 2: No one has ever seen an atom. They’re too small to be seen by a microscope and can’t be counted or weighed individually.: http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/nanoquest/atom_manipulation/index.html
Page 65, Position 3: Plato thought that the smallest particles of matter were tiny right-angled triangles.: Mauro Dardo, Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics (2004) p. 178.
Page 65, Position 4: Since at least the time of Pythagoras in 500 bc, no sensible educated person has believed the Earth was flat.: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/07/22/2633359.htm
Page 66, Position 1: A snowflake that falls on a glacier in central Greenland can take 200,000 years to reach the sea.: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/flashbks/snow/snow.htm
Page 66, Position 2: The King James Bible has inspired the lyrics of more pop songs than any other book.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2011/51/pop-goes-the-bible.html
Page 66, Position 3: In 2001, the World Christian Encyclopaedia counted 33,830 different Christian denominations.: http://www.adherents.com/misc/WCE.html
Page 66, Position 4: Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate Easter, Christmas or birthdays.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/witnesses/ataglance/glance.shtml
Page 67, Position 1: For 48 years after tinned food was invented, people who wanted to eat it had to use a hammer and chisel. The can opener wasn’t invented until 1858.: http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/canopener.htm
Page 67, Position 2: The screwdriver was invented a hundred years before the screw. It was originally used to extract nails.: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Screwdriver.html#b; The modern-day screw, that is. There have been screw-like objects, to lift water for instance, since Archimedes' time at least.
Page 67, Position 3: ‘Marking’ was invented at Cambridge University in 1792 by a chemistry tutor called William Farish.: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6021570
Page 67, Position 4: Margaret Thatcher was part of the team that invented Mr Whippy ice cream.: http://www.mrwhippyicecream.co.uk/the-history-of-ice-cream/
Page 68, Position 1: A single sperm contains 37.5mb of DNA information. One ejaculation represents a data transfer of 15,875gb, equivalent to the combined capacity of 62 MacBook Pro laptops.: The internet has had much to say about the amount of data transferred in an ejaculation. The figures vary widely, and in fact you could argue that as only one sperm fertilises the egg, the actual data transfer is equivalent only to a large email attachment.; http://www.drfrankscali.com/personal-record/2012/5/2/data-transfer-of-humans.html
Page 68, Position 2: 70% of all animals in the jungle rely on figs for their survival.: http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/strangler_figs.htm
Page 68, Position 3: In Antigua, ‘fig’ means banana.: http://www.fodors.com/world/caribbean/antigua-and-barbuda/review-94111.html
Page 68, Position 4: Linnaeus named the banana Musa paradisiaca because he thought it might have been the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden.: http://www.linnaeus.uu.se/online/life/6_3.html
Page 69, Position 1: The citizens of Kuwait celebrated the end of the first Gulf War by firing weapons into the air. 20 Kuwaitis died as a result of bullets falling from the sky.: http://ats.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/83/1/283
Page 69, Position 2: The main predators of flamingos are zookeepers.: Dr Christopher M. Perrins and Dr Alex L. A. Middleton (eds) The Encyclopaedia of Birds (1985) p. 89.
Page 69, Position 3: At the outbreak of the Second World War, zookeepers killed all the venomous insects and snakes in London Zoo, in case it was bombed and they escaped.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/02/a2065402.shtml
Page 69, Position 4: The boa constrictor is the only living animal whose common name is exactly the same as its scientific name.: At least we've not been able to find any other animals whose common and scientific names are identical. If you can think of one, then get in touch.; http://old.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=724505
Page 70, Position 1: In the 318 years between 1539 and 1857, there were only 317 divorces in England.: http://www.divorcearticles.co.uk/history-uk-divorce-law-20th-century/
Page 70, Position 2: At the 1900 Paris Olympics, events included Live Pigeon Shooting and Long Jump for Horses.: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1270844,00.html
Page 70, Position 3: Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, it is explicitly illegal in Britain to use a machine gun to kill a hedgehog.: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/69/contents
Page 70, Position 4: In ancient Greek the word ‘idiot’ meant anyone who wasn’t a politician.: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=idiot
Page 71, Position 1: The Icelandic phone book is ordered by first name.: http://www.iceland.is/did-you-know
Page 71, Position 2: The human eye can detect 10 million different shades of colour.: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/bit-depth.htm
Page 71, Position 3: Wombats have cubic faeces.: http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/discovery-centre-news/2009-archive/square-poo/
Page 71, Position 4: Harvard University has the largest ant collection in the world.: http://ant.edb.miyakyo-u.ac.jp/Harvard/ANT_MCZ.html
Page 72, Position 1: It takes a photon 40,000 years to get from the centre of the Sun to its surface, but only 8.3 minutes to get from there to the Earth.: http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/venus/a11354.html
Page 72, Position 2: For water to flow 100 metres through the ground down a 1° slope takes 5 days through gravel, 13.7 years through sand and 137,000 years through clay.: E. C. Pielou, Fresh Water (1998) p. 13.
Page 72, Position 3: In 1969, Apollo 11 returned from the Moon in half the time it took to get from Boston to New York by stagecoach in 1769.: http://www.thehistorybox.com/ny_city/nycity_census_pt_IV_U.S._transportation_1790_article00826.htm"http://heiwaco.tripod.com/moontravel.htm
Page 72, Position 4: New York City drifts about one inch away from Europe every year.: http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/continental-drift/?ar_a=1&ar_r=3
Page 73, Position 1: Between 1960 and 1977, the secret number authorising US presidents to launch nuclear missiles was 00000000.: http://web.mit.edu/gelliott/Public/sts.072/paper.pdf
Page 73, Position 2: Jimmy Carter once sent a jacket to the dry-cleaner’s with the nuclear detonation codes still in the pocket.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/clinton-mislaid-nuclear-launch-code-for-months-general-reveals-2113416.html
Page 73, Position 3: Worried about his grades at law school, Richard Nixon broke into the Dean’s office – only to discover that he was top of his class.: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/12/books/beyond-damnation-or-defense-the-early-years.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Page 73, Position 4: The highest scoring word in Scrabble is oxyphenbutazone, potentially earning 1,178 points. (It’s a drug used to treat arthritis.): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119222230854957639.html
Page 74, Position 1: A coal-fired power station puts 100 times more radiation into the air than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Page 74, Position 2: Treasure Island in Lake Mindemoya on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron is the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake in the world.: http://scienceray.com/earth-sciences/physical-geography/largest-island-in-a-lake-on-an-island-in-a-lake-on-an-island/
Page 74, Position 3: The strongest creatures on Earth are gonorrhoea bacteria. They can pull 100,000 times their own body weight.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13666-sexually-transmitted-bug-is-the-strongest-organism.html
Page 74, Position 4: A dog has the same ecological footprint as two Toyota Landcruisers; a cat the same environmental effect as a Volkswagen Golf; two hamsters the same as a plasma TV.: http://www.grist.org/article/dogs-vs.-suvs/
Page 75, Position 1: Humans have the same number of hair follicles as chimpanzees.: http://www.economist.com/node/21541808
Page 75, Position 2: Gorillas and potatoes have two more chromosomes than people.: http://www.wisegeek.com/how-many-chromosomes-do-potatoes-have.htm
Page 75, Position 3: The average person who lives to be 75 will have spent six years dreaming.: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/dream3.htm
Page 75, Position 4: The word ambisinistrous is the opposite of ambidextrous; it means ‘no good with either hand’.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 76, Position 1: James Garfield, 20th president of the USA, could write Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other.: http://www.ipl.org/div/potus/jagarfield.html
Page 76, Position 2: Young Neanderthal girls had bigger biceps than an adult male human.: http://www.smh.com.au/world/science/men-x2013-theyx2019re-just-not-what-they-used-to-be-20090805-ea31.html
Page 76, Position 3: The second man to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, Bobby Leach, survived the fall but later died as a result of slipping on a piece of orange peel.: http://www.niagarafallslive.com/daredevils_of_niagara_falls.htm
Page 76, Position 4: An orange is a berry but a strawberry isn’t.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry
Page 77, Position 1: Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world. Though the resident population is only just over 800, more than 600 crimes are committed there each year.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2639777.stm
Page 77, Position 2: 90% of the crime in Helmand province is committed by the Afghan police.: http://www.noworseenemy.com/
Page 77, Position 3: 50% more US soldiers committed suicide in 2012 than were killed in action in Afghanistan.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/08/suicide-rise-us-military
Page 77, Position 4: In 117 ad, Emperor Hadrian declared attempted suicide by soldiers a form of desertion and made it a capital offence.: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2501/is-suicide-against-the-law
Page 78, Position 1: Jack Bauer, the lead character in the TV series 24, killed 112 people in the first five seasons of the show.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/jul/02/features.review2
Page 78, Position 2: The longest hangover in medical literature lasted four weeks. It belonged to a 37-year-old man from Glasgow.: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/worlds-longest-hangover/story-e6freuy9-1111114523917
Page 78, Position 3: In 1715, a group of Jacobite rebels failed to take Edinburgh Castle because their rope ladders were six feet too short.: Michael Fry, Edinburgh (2011)
Page 78, Position 4: The first manager of the first McDonald’s franchise was called Ed MacLuckie.: http://www.lansingmi.gov/something_cool.jsp
Page 79, Position 1: Coca-Cola in the Maldives is made from seawater.: Tom Masters, Maldives (2009) p. 50
Page 79, Position 2: A ‘riot’ in England and Wales must legally involve a minimum of 12 people. Under US federal law it’s only three people and in Nevada only two.: http://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-203.html"http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/"http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1961/0043/latest/DLM328561.html"http://antiauthoritarian.net/NLN/?p=77"http://indymedia.org.au/melbournenews/2006/11/131545.php"http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/19/murder-rate-rose-5-percent
Page 79, Position 3: More than 1 in 20 football injuries are caused by celebrating goals on the pitch.: http://www.physioroom.com/blog/celebrating-can-be-dangerous/
Page 79, Position 4: Slavery was not made a statutory offence in the UK until 6th April 2010.: http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/slavery_servitude_and_forced_or_compulsory_labour/
Page 80, Position 1: Diagnosed with pleurisy, Sir Robert Chesebrough, the inventor of Vaseline, decided to coat himself in his product from head to foot. He survived and lived to be 96.: Daily Telegraph, 16 April 2007
Page 80, Position 2: In 1915, Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest in San Francisco. Not only did he not win, he failed even to make the final.: http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/chaplin2.asp
Page 80, Position 3: Male fruit flies rejected by females drink significantly more alcohol than those that have had a successful encounter.: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-15/sex-deprived-male-fruit-flies-turn-to-alcohol-research-shows.html
Page 80, Position 4: In Inuktitut, iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga means ‘I should try not to become an alcoholic’.: http://www.nysun.com/opinion/dying-languages/45847/
Page 81, Position 1: 2,520 is the smallest number that can be exactly divided by all the numbers 1 to 10.: David Wells, The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers (1997) p. 155.
Page 81, Position 2: 2.5 million Mills & Boon novels were pulped and added to the tarmac of the UK’s M6 toll motorway to make it more absorbent.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/3330245.stm
Page 81, Position 3: In 1999, more than 3,000 people were hospitalised after tripping over a laundry basket.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/jun/07/angeliquechrisafis1
Page 81, Position 4: In 1997, 39 people in the UK found themselves in hospital with tea-cosy-related injuries.: http://www.hsj.co.uk/news/accidents/30714.article
Page 82, Position 1: Deipnophobia n. The fear of dinner party conversations.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 82, Position 2: Nomophobia n. The fear of being out of mobile phone contact.: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Technology/2012/09/18/Addiction-center-treats-nomophobia/UPI-36311348010804/
Page 82, Position 3: Metrophobia n. Fear of poetry.: http://common-phobias.com/Metro/phobia.htm
Page 82, Position 4: Lachanophobia n. Fear of vegetables.: http://common-phobias.com/Lachano/phobia.htm
Page 83, Position 1: Since 1990, the number of people living in poverty in China has fallen from 85% to 15%.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7583719.stm
Page 83, Position 2: A ‘knot’ is something tied in a single piece of rope or line. Something that joins two ropes together is a ‘bend’.: Jennifer Hazelrigs and Timothy Kidd, Rock Climbing (2009) p. 143.
Page 83, Position 3: A baby oyster is called a ‘spat’.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 83, Position 4: More chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos are eaten by people every year than there are in all the zoos in the world.: http://www.bonobo.org/bushmeat.htm"http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/07/congo-chimpanzees-bushmeat; This is actually quite an understatement. There are about 1,000 chimpanzees, 750 gorillas and 220 bonobos currently in world zoos while our sources suggest 6,000 chimpanzees and at the very least 2,000 gorillas are killed for bushmeat every year.
Page 84, Position 1: In the 19th century, sausages were marketed as ‘bags of mystery’.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1309350/Why-ARE-sausages-called-bangers-And-earths-Caesar-got-salad-The-fascinating-origins-favourite-dishes.html
Page 84, Position 2: If a vampire were to feed once a day and turn each of his victims into a vampire, the entire human population of the planet would become vampires in just over a month.: Calculation by the QI Elves.
Page 84, Position 3: Relative to our galaxy, the Earth is travelling through space at more than 500,000 mph.: http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109/lectures/spec_rel.html
Page 84, Position 4: The Sun takes 220 million years to orbit the galaxy, a journey it has made 20 times so far.: http://www.ualberta.ca/~pogosyan/teaching/ASTRO_122/lect24/lecture24.html
Page 85, Position 1: Abbey-lubber n. A lazy monk.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 85, Position 2: Acrochordon n. A wart that hangs down like a string.: The Oxford English Dictionary"Oh no! God, no!!
Page 85, Position 3: Apport n. Something that appears out of thin air: the opposite of a vanishing.: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apport
Page 85, Position 4: Autotelic adj. Worth doing for its own sake.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 86, Position 1: Although Shakespeare’s works run to more than a million words, only 14 exist in his own handwriting: 12 of them are his signatures and the other two are ‘by’ and ‘me’.: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19360627&id=7-ZUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BpIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5346,4380165
Page 86, Position 2: George W. Bush named The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle as his favourite childhood book. It was published when he was 23 years old.: Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman, The Press Effect (2004) p. 61.
Page 86, Position 3: In 2012, Britain’s Eurovision entrant, Englebert Humperdinck (76), was not only the oldest of the contestants, he was older than more than 20 of the countries they represented.: Extensive research by the QI Elves after reading a joke fact first posted on Twitter by @scully188
Page 86, Position 4: Swans do not sing (before dying or otherwise), although one species, the Whistling Swan, whistles a bit.: Alice L. Price, Swans of the World: In Nature, History, Myth & Art (1994) p. 52
Page 87, Position 1: There are ten times as many stars in the known universe as there are grains of sand in the world.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/1436902/More-stars-than-grains-of-sand.html
Page 87, Position 2: The ties bought in America for Father’s Day each year would stretch from New York to Rome.: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0615/p18s02-hfks.html
Page 87, Position 3: There are thought to be 100,000 uncharted mountains under the sea. Only 1,000 or so have ever been mapped.: http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=1145
Page 87, Position 4: Aborigines, whose culture reaches back to the last Ice Age, have names for (and can locate) mountains that have been under the sea for 8,000 years.: Colin Tudge, The Day Before Yesterday (1995) p. 24.
Page 88, Position 1: Just like humans, British cows moo in accents specific to their region.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5277090.stm
Page 88, Position 2: 95% of all data in the world is still stored on paper. Most of it is never looked at again.: http://www.gussco.com/project/7/
Page 88, Position 3: The common shrew protects itself from predators by dying of fright.: http://animals.jrank.org/pages/2784/Shrews-Soricidae-BEHAVIOR-REPRODUCTION.html
Page 88, Position 4: The next person to walk on the Moon will almost certainly be Chinese.: http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/next-man-on-the-moon-will-be-chinese-say-experts/story-fn5fsgyc-1226459429766#ixzz24lCR4pd7
Page 89, Position 1: Almost half of all babies in China are born by Caesarean section.: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-05/11/content_9836532.htm
Page 89, Position 2: The half a million tonnes of chocolate eaten each year in Britain represent 87% of the entire annual cocoa production of Latin America.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/cotedivoire/1316414/Chocolate-slaves-carry-many-scars.html"http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/y5143e/y5143e0x.htm
Page 89, Position 3: A single zinc mine in Namibia uses a fifth of the country’s electricity supply.: http://cable.tmcnet.com/news/2006/08/18/1816779.htm
Page 89, Position 4: Per gram per second, more energy runs through a sunflower than through the Sun itself.: http://bigthink.com/hybrid-reality/creativity-evolution-of-mind-and-the-vertigo-of-freedom?page=19
Page 90, Position 1: It takes ten times as much energy to heat water as it does to heat iron.: http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/thermalP/u18l2b.cfm
Page 90, Position 2: It takes ten times as much energy to turn water into steam as it does to bring it to the boil.: http://www.ehow.co.uk/video_4951201_long-distill-water_.html
Page 90, Position 3: It takes an hour to soft-boil an ostrich egg and an hour and a half to hard-boil one.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2019565/Anyone-hard-boiled-ostrich-egg-Theyre-flying-shelves--90-minutes-cook.html
Page 90, Position 4: It takes between 70,000 and 150,000 crocuses to make a kilo of saffron.: Ghillia Prance, The Cultural History of Plants (2004) p. 266.
Page 91, Position 1: Alexander the Great washed his hair in saffron to keep it shiny and orange.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1353017/Springwatchs-Kate-Humble-explores-history-favourite-spices.html
Page 91, Position 2: In 1999, a four-year-old girl turned yellow after drinking too much Sunny Delight.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/578945.stm
Page 91, Position 3: Russian has no word for ‘blue’, only two different words for ‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’.: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full
Page 91, Position 4: Andy Warhol always wore green underpants.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/mar/14/vanessathorpe.theobserver
Page 92, Position 1: 25 million Bibles were printed in 2011, compared to 208 million IKEA catalogues.: http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_AE/virtual_catalogue/online_catalogues.html"http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/about-bible-society/what-we-do-around-the-world/making-the-bible-affordable/
Page 92, Position 2: The English version of Wikipedia has 50 times more words than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
Page 92, Position 3: Up to 2010, Wikipedia had taken 100 million person-hours to write: about the same amount of time that the population of the USA spends watching TV ad breaks in a single weekend.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Wikipedia
Page 92, Position 4: There is more information in one edition of the New York Times than the average person in 17th-century England would have come across in a lifetime.: Christine Schöpf and Gerfried Stocker, Human Nature (2009) p. 22.
Page 93, Position 1: When Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity, the New York Times sent their golfing correspondent to interview him.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC259215/
Page 93, Position 2: The historic news of the first manned powered flight by the Wright Brothers first appeared in the magazine Gleanings in Bee Culture.: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wright/reporter.html
Page 93, Position 3: Dune, by Frank Herbert, the world’s bestselling science fiction novel, was rejected over 20 times before being accepted by a publisher of car manuals.: http://www.frankherbert.org/wormsblog/page051.html
Page 93, Position 4: Ernest Hemingway bought the shotgun that he used to kill himself at Abercrombie & Fitch.: http://biblioklept.org/2011/07/02/ernest-hemingways-suicide-gun/
Page 94, Position 1: Leonardo da Vinci was the first person to observe the curvature of the human spine. Until then everyone had assumed that it was straight.: http://www.c3.hu/~mavideg/ns/Sananetal.html
Page 94, Position 2: Rosa whitfield is a rose named after actress June Whitfield. As she pointed out, ‘The catalogue describes it as “superb for bedding, best up against a wall”.’: http://www.curioustaxonomy.net/misc/stories.html
Page 94, Position 3: Someone who is cock-throppled has an extremely prominent Adam’s apple.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 94, Position 4: The symbols used by !$%@ing cartoonists to indicate swearing are called grawlixes.: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AwgLAAAACAAJ&dq=The+Lexicon+of+Comicana+by+Mort+Walker
Page 95, Position 1: Jeremy Bentham’s body has been dressed in moth-resistant underwear since 1939.: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-weasel-1144575.html
Page 95, Position 2: When Jeremy Paxman was at Cambridge, he failed to get into his college’s University Challenge team.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/28/jerem-paxman-fails-university-challenge
Page 95, Position 3: Before Jeremy Clarkson became a journalist, he sold Paddington Bears for a living.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/56354.stm
Page 95, Position 4: Jeremy Kyle’s father was the Queen Mother’s accountant and personal secretary.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/9244081/Jeremy-Kyle-Wallis-Simpson-is-to-blame-for-George-VIs-death.html; At least we assume he's Jeremy Kyle's father, to our knowledge, they've not had a DNA test.
Page 96, Position 1: A babalevante is someone who makes feeble jokes.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 96, Position 2: Babeship is another word for infancy.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 96, Position 3: Borborygmi are stomach rumbles.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 96, Position 4: Buggerare is Italian for ‘to cheat’ or ‘swindle’.: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buggerare
Page 97, Position 1: If you have a pizza with radius z and thickness a, its volume is pi*z*z*a.: This is one of our most popular Tweets ever, though it's a simple joke based on high school mathematics.
Page 97, Position 2: In 1998, 10,113 American women insured themselves against Virgin Birth at the millennium.: New Scientist, 27 March 1999 (referencing Harper's Bazaar magazine)
Page 97, Position 3: The first motorist to be fined for speeding in the UK was Walter Arnold in 1896. He was doing 8mph in a 2mph zone.: http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Undefined-Headline/story-12013888-detail/story.html
Page 97, Position 4: The first London Underground trains were nicknamed ‘sewer trams’.: Jeremy Beadle, Jeremy Beadle's Today's the Day: A Chronicle of the Curious (1979) p. 24.
Page 98, Position 1: The world’s lightest metal is 100 times lighter than styrofoam and can rest on a dandelion puff without damaging it.: http://today.uci.edu/news/2011/11/nr_lightmetal_111117.php
Page 98, Position 2: Graphene, the world’s strongest material, is a million times thinner than paper but 200 times stronger than steel.: http://www.graphenano.com/english/graphene.html
Page 98, Position 3: To break through a sheet of graphene as thick as cling film would take the force of an elephant balanced on the point of a pencil.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9491789.stm
Page 98, Position 4: The pressure in the deepest ocean, at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, is equal to the weight of ten brown bears balancing on a postage stamp.: http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/bear.html"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench"http://www.metric-conversions.org/area/square-millimeters-to-square-inches.htm
Page 99, Position 1: All polar bears are Irish: they’re descended from brown bears that lived in Ireland over 10,000 years ago.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-13965286
Page 99, Position 2: More than half the world’s population is under 25 and more than half of it is bilingual.: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201011/bilingualisms-best-kept-secret"http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s962527.htm
Page 99, Position 3: Established writers and artists are 18 times more likely to kill themselves than the general population.: What Makes a Genius? In Scientific American Magazine (30 Jan 2008) p. 58.
Page 99, Position 4: People with schizophrenia are three times more likely to smoke than the average person.: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2008/10/14-04.html
Page 100, Position 1: Zischeln is a useful German verb meaning ‘to whisper angrily’.: http://www.wordreference.com/deen/zischeln
Page 100, Position 2: The Italian verb asolare means ‘to pass time in a delightful but meaningless way’.: http://www.italianvisits.com/veneto/asolo/index.htm
Page 100, Position 3: Hungarian has no words for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’, but nine specific words for different kinds of brother or sister.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language
Page 100, Position 4: In North Welsh, the word for ‘now’ is rwan, in South Welsh it is nawr, the same word spelt backwards.: http://www.kimkat.org/amryw/1_cwrs/cwrs_0016_ENG_adferfiau_amser_0915e.htm
Page 101, Position 1: Gold has its own E number. E175 is officially suitable for consumption by vegetarians, vegans and members of all religious groups.: http://www.ediblegold.co.uk/advice.php
Page 101, Position 2: The Victorians made tiepins out of badgers’ penis bones.: http://www.badgerland.co.uk/education/stories/folklore.html
Page 101, Position 3: Some parts of Tasmania are so fertile that the topsoil is 70 feet deep.: http://www.mrt.tas.gov.au/mrtdoc/dominfo/download/UR2007_01/UR2007_01.pdf
Page 101, Position 4: Trinity College, Cambridge, has won more Nobel Prizes than the whole of Italy.: http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=401"http://www.nobelprize.org/
Page 102, Position 1: The human body has 100 trillion cells, each one a 10,000th the size of a pinhead but containing enough DNA instructions to fill 1,000 600-page books.: Popular Science, November 1994
Page 102, Position 2: Every three seconds, the Sun emits more neutrinos than the number of atoms in all the humans who have ever lived.: Frank Close, Neutrino (2010) p. 1.
Page 102, Position 3: Neutrinos are 100,000 times smaller than electrons, but there are so many of them that they may outweigh all the visible matter in the universe.: http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v30n2/neutrino.shtml
Page 102, Position 4: If an atom were the size of theSolarSystem, a neutrino would be the size of a golf ball.: Philip Ball, Stories of the Invisible: a Guided Tour of Molecules (2001); http://www.garvandwane.com/cosmology/faster_than_light.html
Page 103, Position 1: The man who sees to the needs of VIPs in the official presidential guest house in Washingtondc is called Randy Bumgardner.: Randy's website has an extra 'a' which is usually omitted from British press reports.; http://www.randybaumgardner.com/"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/14/david-cameron-us-visit-state-dinner
Page 103, Position 2: The founder of Pan American Airlines was called Juan Trippe.: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/trippe_hi.html
Page 103, Position 3: The Archbishop of Manila from 1974–2003 was called Cardinal Sin.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4113534.stm
Page 103, Position 4: Robert Burns was never called Rabbie or Robbie – though he did occasionally call himself Spunkie.: http://www.robertburns.plus.com/factandfict.htm
Page 104, Position 1: The film Jaws was based on a novel by Peter Benchley. When he couldn’t think of a title, his father, Nathaniel, suggested What’s That Noshin’ On Ma Leg.: Daily Mail, 14 February 2006
Page 104, Position 2: As soon as tiger shark embryos develop teeth they attack and eat each other in the womb.: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/sharkland/animal-cannibalism/1946/
Page 104, Position 3: If the three quarks in a hydrogen atom were scaled up to the size of garden peas, the hydrogen atom would be 1,000 miles across.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)
Page 104, Position 4: If all the land in Finland were distributed equally, each Finn would have 14% more space than Heathrow Airport’s shopping area.: According to the Elves' own calculations Finland has 56,000 square meters for each of its citizens - Heathrow Airport is home to 48,000 square meters of shopping.; http://news.cheapflights.com/top-10-airports-for-shopping/
Page 105, Position 1: Human saliva contains a painkiller called opiorphin that is six times more powerful than morphine.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10514-naturalborn-painkiller-found-in-human-saliva.html
Page 105, Position 2: The average American produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime: about the same amount of water as leaks from the average American home in a year.: Julie McDowell, Encyclopedia of Human Body Systems (2010) p. 1.
Page 105, Position 3: The platypus and the echidna are the only mammals that could make their own custard: they both lay eggs and produce milk.: http://www.biology.iastate.edu/InternationalTrips/1Australia/04papers/CromerMonotrRepro.htm
Page 105, Position 4: The Chupa Chups logo was designed by Salvador Dalí.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2004/jan/03/guardianobituaries.spain
Page 106, Position 1: 4,000 McDonald’s hamburgers (as many as you could get from one cow) are eaten every minute.: http://www.goindie.com/dish/index.cfm/origins/article/id/19582A04-7B59-4464-9073B7CB1AD90478"http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/176/how-many-cows-are-slaughtered-each-year-to-make-mcdonalds-hamburgers
Page 106, Position 2: Every year, 4 million cats are eaten in Asia.: http://www.animalsasia.org/index.php?UID=9759DE5K7FU
Page 106, Position 3: In 2011, Chinese billionaire Long Liyuan was murdered at a business lunch by means of poison in his slow-boiled cat-meat casserole.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/04/poison-cat-meat-chinese-tycoon
Page 106, Position 4: When eating jelly babies, nearly eight out of ten people bite off the heads first.: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=274512194
Page 107, Position 1: More gold is recoverable from a tonne of personal computers than from 17 tonnes of gold ore.: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs060-01/fs060-01.pdf
Page 107, Position 2: The gold dissolved in the world’s oceans is estimated to be worth $475 trillion: about 30 times the US public debt.: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303630404577392104017737774.html
Page 107, Position 3: In 1917, John D. Rockefeller could have paid off the whole US public debt on his own. Today, Bill Gates’s entire fortune would barely cover two months’ interest.: http://blogs.rgj.com/brianloy/2012/08/02/what-lurks-in-the-grass/
Page 107, Position 4: Tyrannosaurus rex (65 million years ago) is closer in time to us than to Diplodocus (150 million years ago).: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/prehistoric/tyrannosaurus-rex/"http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Diplodocus
Page 108, Position 1: There are about 6,900 languages in existence but more than half the world’s population uses only 20 of them.: Serena Nanda and Richard L. Warms, Culture Counts: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (2008) p. 89.
Page 108, Position 2: In English, the name of every number shares a letter with each neighbour. One shares an O with two, which shares a T with three, which shares an R with four, which shares an F with five, which shares an I with six – and so on indefinitely.: You can prove this yourself, by simply writing all of the numbers in the Universe.
Page 108, Position 3: Archimedes’ number myriakis-myriostas periodu myriakis-myriston arithmon myriai myriades is one followed by 80 quadrillion zeroes.: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20010402/biggest_numbers.shtml
Page 108, Position 4: In 2010, YouTube was watched 700 billion times, but 99% of the views were of only 30% of the videos.: http://www.reelseo.com/60-hours-video-uploaded-to-youtube-minute/
Page 109, Position 1: In 1900, all the world’s mathematical knowledge could be written in about 80 books; today it would fill more than 100,000.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/may/13/scienceandnature
Page 109, Position 2: In 2005, the 54 billionaires in Britain paid only £14.7 million in income tax between them. Of this, £9 million came from James Dyson.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-billionaires-who-do-pay-their-bills-including-james-dyson-and-jk-rowling-7873607.html
Page 109, Position 3: In 2011, only nine of the 62 owners of apartments in One Hyde Park, London, the world’s most expensive block of flats, paid any council tax.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/26/one-hyde-park-council-tax
Page 109, Position 4: Over 600,000 companies (including 25 with flats in One Hyde Park) are registered in the British Virgin Islands (population 28,882).: http://www.britishvirginislands-ibc-registration.com/BritishVirginIslands_International_trade_and_investment.html
Page 110, Position 1: In the first month of its life, a silkworm puts on 10,000 times its birth weight.: http://www.thesilkmuseum.com/TheMuseum/Ecomuseum_en.html
Page 110, Position 2: A female ferret will die if she doesn’t have sex for a year.: http://www.ferret-world.com/maleferretvsfemaleferret.html
Page 110, Position 3: A six-inch catfish has more than 250,000 taste buds.: http://www.gameandfishmag.com/2010/09/28/fishing_catfish-fishing_gf_aa076502a/
Page 110, Position 4: A full Kindle weighs a billionth of a billionth of a gram more than a brand-new one.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/26/kindle-weighs-more-when-fully-loaded
Page 111, Position 1: There are over 1,200 species of bat in the world and not one of them is blind.: http://www.bats.org.uk/pages/echolocation.html
Page 111, Position 2: There are 4,800 species of frog in the world but only one of them goes ‘ribbit’.: David Badger, Frogs Worldlife Library (2000) p. 16.
Page 111, Position 3: Eight times as many people belong to the National Trust as to the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties combined.: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parliament.uk%2Fbriefing-papers%2FSN05125.pdf&ei=YOYQULuHDqm90QXJ0oHwCg&usg=AFQjCNHLDLzazFN6D5ylscgYniK6At21Fw
Page 111, Position 4: Every human being starts out life as an arsehole: it’s the first part of the body to form in the womb.: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/phyla/deuterostomia.html
Page 112, Position 1: 51% of British women under 50 have never been married: twice as many as in 1980.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1126658/Rise-freemale-Number-single-women-doubles-decades.html
Page 112, Position 2: Kanye North and Kanye South (but not Kanye West) are parliamentary constituencies in Botswana.: http://www.webcitation.org/5rhN1N2L4
Page 112, Position 3: The animal rights group PETA claims that cows can suffer humiliation if people laugh at them.: Independent on Sunday, 24 February 2002
Page 112, Position 4: Wagamama is Japanese for ‘selfish’.: http://wagamama.com/about/
Page 113, Position 1: In 2009, Exxon made $19 billion profit but received a $156 million federal tax rebate.: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/dec/10/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-filibuster-exxon-mobil/
Page 113, Position 2: Only 2% of women describe themselves as beautiful.: http://www.dove.us/Social-Mission/campaign-for-real-beauty.aspx
Page 113, Position 3: In the 1950s, 3-D films were known as ‘deepies’.: Sight and Sound, Vols 22-3 p. 31.
Page 113, Position 4: Loch Ness is deep enough and long enough to contain the entire population of the world ten times over.: http://www.nessie.co.uk/htm/about_loch_ness/lochnes.html
Page 114, Position 1: 40% of the electricity in Pakistan goes missing, half of it stolen: if there’s a power cut (which is often), they just steal the wires.: http://pakistancriminalrecords.com/2011/09/06/timergara-electricity-wires-stolen/
Page 114, Position 2: In 2011, British trains were delayed by 16,000 hours because of people stealing metal parts from the railways.: http://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/Content/detail.aspx?NewsAreaId=2&ReleaseID=5976
Page 114, Position 3: After Einstein died, his brain was pickled, sliced into 240 cubes and left in a box marked ‘Costa Cider’ for 20 years.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/honda-dream-factory/our-greatest-innovator-albert-einstein
Page 114, Position 4: Sir Walter Raleigh’s devoted widow Elizabeth kept his decapitated head with her in a velvet bag for 29 years.: http://www.britannia.com/bios/raleigh/executio.html
Page 115, Position 1: Forflitten adj. Overwhelmed by unreasonable and out-of-proportion scolding.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 115, Position 2: Forwallowed adj. Weary with being tossed about.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 115, Position 3: Rhinorrhea n. The medical condition otherwise known as ‘a runny nose’.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 115, Position 4: Subitise vb To perceive the number of objects in a group without actually counting them.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 116, Position 1: An acrocomic is someone with long hair. According to the OxfordEnglishDictionary, the word hasn’t been used since it was coined in 1626. Until now, that is.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 116, Position 2: The word ‘unfriend’ first appeared in print in 1659.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 116, Position 3: Berk and charlie (as in ‘a proper charlie’) are rhyming slang for ‘Berkshire Hunt’ and ‘Charlie Hunt’.: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=berk"http://www.thefreedictionary.com/charlie
Page 116, Position 4: The most popular beers in Turkmenistan are called ‘Berk’ and ‘Zip’.: http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/6500098
Page 117, Position 1: As a reward for winning the part of Harry Potter, the 11-year-old Daniel Radcliffe was allowed to stay up and watch Fawlty Towers.: http://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/celebrity/celebrity-galleries/2012/02/daniel-radcliffe-twitter-chat-and-interview#!image-number=5
Page 117, Position 2: Durham University offers a Harry Potter module. It includes the topic ‘Gryffindor and Slytherin: prejudice and intolerance in the classroom’.: https://www.dur.ac.uk/faculty.handbook/module_description/?year=2010&module_code=EDUC2381
Page 117, Position 3: The word ‘school’ comes from the ancient Greek for ‘free time’.: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=school
Page 117, Position 4: In particle physics, a ‘barn’ is an area that covers a billionth of the cross-section of a silk fibre. It’s called a barn because (in subatomic terms) it’s so huge.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14258601
Page 118, Position 1: In 2010, twice as many Britons died in accidents in their own homes as in traffic accidents.: http://www.rospa.com/homesafety/Info/re-valuation.pdf
Page 118, Position 2: The names Honda and Toyota derive from Japanese words for different kinds of rice field.: http://www.asiarice.org/sections/riceheritage/ricewords.html
Page 118, Position 3: In French, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Latvian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Tagalog, the words for ‘time’ and ‘weather’ are the same.: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=10576&PN=1
Page 118, Position 4: Britain is the windiest country in Europe.: http://edition.cnn.com/BUSINESS/programs/yourbusiness/stories2001/windiest/
Page 119, Position 1: The Inuit use the same word, sila, to mean both ‘weather’ and ‘consciousness’.: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1184255?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101115887047
Page 119, Position 2: There are five categories of hurricane. The slowest outpaces a cheetah; the fastest beats the world’s fastest roller coaster (149 mph).: http://www.hurricanemarketing.com/hurricanes/hurricanes_types.htm
Page 119, Position 3: There are at least 300 earthquakes a year in the UK, but only 11 people have ever died in one.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7991656/Police-given-powerful-earthquake-training-for-extremely-unlikely-crisis.html
Page 119, Position 4: There is no known scientific way of predicting earthquakes. The most reliable method is to count the number of missing cats in the local paper: if it trebles, an earthquake is imminent.: http://www.johnmartin.com/earthquakes/eqpapers/00000072.htm
Page 120, Position 1: The amount of water on Earth is constant, and continually recycled over time: some of the water you drink will have passed through a dinosaur.: http://www.thebigthirst.com/the-book/
Page 120, Position 2: 95% of the lead in British army bullets comes from recycled materials.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9498883/Readied-aimed-fired-to-Helmand-and-back.html
Page 120, Position 3: A squishop is a squire who is also a bishop.: Bill Sherk, 500 Years of New Words (2004) p. 232.
Page 120, Position 4: Muammar is Arabic for ‘long-lived’.: http://orientalreview.org/2011/10/23/what-does-gadhafi%E2%80%99s-death-mean/
Page 121, Position 1: A newborn giant panda weighs less than a cup of tea.: http://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/giantpandas/pandafacts/babydevelopment.cfm
Page 121, Position 2: The CIA reads up to 5 million tweets a day.: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221564/CIA_monitors_up_to_5_million_tweets_daily_report_says
Page 121, Position 3: 85% of the clicking on web ads is done by 8% of the people. Since 2008, the number of clicks has halved.: http://about.adkeeper.com/blog/2011/04/19/why-don%E2%80%99t-people-click-on-ads/
Page 121, Position 4: The 6-trillionth, 8-trillionth, 9-trillionth and 10-trillionth digits of pi are all fives.: http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-10t/details.html
Page 122, Position 1: Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don’t eat rice.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3371659.stm
Page 122, Position 2: Barley has twice as many genes as people.: http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/151/2/496.full
Page 122, Position 3: Scotland has twice as many giant pandas as Conservative MPs.: http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/news/home-news/are-independence-scare-stories-more-likely-to-have-the-opposite-effect.16544233?_=c218cb5e45847f2c965133d8f133c8a9a37148ee
Page 122, Position 4: Statistically speaking, the Vatican has two popes per square kilometre.: http://geography.about.com/cs/countries/a/smallcountries.htm; With an area of 0.44 square kilometres, it is actually 2.27 popes.
Page 123, Position 1: Sending a man to the Moon and finding Osama Bin Laden cost the US government about the same amount of time and money: ten years and $100 billion.: Figures vary wildly, of course, with some people calculating the cost of finding Bin Laden as high as a trillion dollars.; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/Apollo-11-Moon-landing"http://business.time.com/2011/05/03/how-much-has-osama-bin-laden-cost-the-us
Page 123, Position 2: IMAX projectors weigh as much as hippos. Their bulbs cost $6,000 each and are bright enough to be seen from the International Space Station.: http://www.thehenryford.org/imax/about.aspx
Page 123, Position 3: The International Space Station has cost more than 30 times its own weight in gold.: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/onthestation/facts_and_figures.html
Page 123, Position 4: In 2005, Americans spent 6 billion hours filling in tax forms, at an estimated cost of $265 billion.: http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2011/01/05/tax-waste-6-1-billion-hours-spent-complying-with-federal-tax-code/
Page 124, Position 1: Between 1948 and 1998, 20,362 Israelis were killed in wars and 20,852 were killed on the roads.: http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-One-Third-Daffodil-Astound/dp/0767932463
Page 124, Position 2: The American TV sex therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer trained as an Israeli sniper.: http://www.snopes.com/medical/doctor/drruth.asp
Page 124, Position 3: Snipur is Icelandic for ‘clitoris’.: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sneepur
Page 124, Position 4: Taking cocaine increases the chance of having a heart attack within the hour by 2,400%.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/355256.stm
Page 125, Position 1: Oystercatchers don’t catch oysters.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Eurasian_Oystercatcher
Page 125, Position 2: Cows carry cowpox but chickens don’t carry chickenpox.: British Medical Journal, 16 September 2000
Page 125, Position 3: Cocks don’t have cocks. In 97% of bird species, the males don’t have penises.: Frank Edwin Robinson, Optimizing Chick Production in Broiler Breeders (2003) p. 84.
Page 125, Position 4: The rooster on the Corn Flakes box is called Cornelius. They chose a rooster because the word ceiliog, Welsh for cockerel, sounds a bit like Kellogg.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gfz8k
Page 126, Position 1: Welsh has no single words for ‘yes’ or ‘no’.: http://www.croeso-betws.org.uk/iaith/phrases.htm
Page 126, Position 2: Russian has no word for ‘bigot’.: Boris Unbegaun and Marcus Wheeler, Oxford Russian Dictionary (2007)
Page 126, Position 3: French has no word for ‘shallow’.: http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-187912,00.html
Page 126, Position 4: Latin has no word for ‘interesting’.: http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-Latin-equivalent-of-the-word-interesting
Page 127, Position 1: Uranium is 40 times more common than silver and 500 times more common than gold.: http://www.cameco.com/uranium_101/
Page 127, Position 2: In Spanish, the word esposas means both ‘wives’ and ‘handcuffs’.: http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/esposa
Page 127, Position 3: Boghandler is Danish for ‘bookseller’.: http://www.eudict.com/?lang=daneng&word=boghandler
Page 127, Position 4: Serbia is the world’s leading exporter of raspberries.: http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Serbia/Raspberries-Serbia-s-Red-Gold-83572
Page 128, Position 1: In 1956, there were only 12 cars on Ibiza.: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/travel/world/destination/history/ibiza
Page 128, Position 2: About half a million mice live in the London Underground.: http://www.dynopest.co.uk/business/500000-mice-on-the-london-underground-and-rising/
Page 128, Position 3: The Companies Act (2006) is the longest act in history; it is so complex that most British companies unwittingly break the law six times a day.: Make yourself a cuppa, the list of contents alone is 59 pages long. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/contents
Page 128, Position 4: Per head of population, Britain has 13 times as many accountants as Germany.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/25/accountancy-audits-global-professional-standards
Page 129, Position 1: The average pencil can write 45,000 words, or a single line 35 miles long.: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/20-things-you-didnt-know-about-pencils/
Page 129, Position 2: Venus rotates so slowly on its axis that its day is longer than its year.: http://nineplanets.org/venus.html
Page 129, Position 3: Until the 1960s, the only reliable pregnancy test was to inject a woman’s urine into a female African clawed frog. If the woman was pregnant, the frog would ovulate within 12 hours.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4257232.stm
Page 129, Position 4: Chemotherapy is a by-product of the mustard gas used in the First World War.: http://www.cancer.org/Treatment/TreatmentsandSideEffects/TreatmentTypes/Chemotherapy/ChemotherapyPrinciplesAnIn-depthDiscussionoftheTechniquesanditsRoleinTreatment/chemotherapy-principles-what-is-chemo
Page 130, Position 1: The year after the American Civil War ended, a fifth of Mississippi’s state budget was spent on artificial limbs for wounded soldiers.: http://www.apstudynotes.org/us-history/topics/the-civil-war/
Page 130, Position 2: More than 90% of all the blackcurrants grown in Britain go into Ribena.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/19/juicy-story-ribena-blackcurrant
Page 130, Position 3: Nutmeg is illegal in Saudi Arabia because it is hallucinogenic if consumed in large quantities.: http://islamqa.info/en/ref/39408
Page 130, Position 4: Mushrooms are more closely related to humans than to plants.: http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/DeepGreen/NYTimes.html
Page 131, Position 1: The first holiday organised by Thomas Cook was a temperance outing in the East Midlands.: http://www.thomascook.com/about-us/thomas-cook-history/
Page 131, Position 2: Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo all mean ‘capital’ in their respective languages.: http://www.etymonline.com
Page 131, Position 3: Athens is the only capital city in Europe where the air is more polluted outside than inside.: Daily Mail, 9 March 2000
Page 131, Position 4: Skoda is Czech for ‘shame’, ‘damage’ or ‘pity’.: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/emmahartley/9551127/_Skoda_means_shame_damage_or_pity_in_Czech_/
Page 132, Position 1: At least 109 journeys between adjacent London Tube stations are quicker to walk.: Even the most simple of facts can become extremely complicated when you begin to scratch the surface. Follow the link for caveats galore.; http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/how-lies-begin.html
Page 132, Position 2: QI is the most commonly played word in Tournament Scrabble. It’s pronounced ‘chee’ and means ‘life force’ or ‘energy’ in Mandarin.: http://www.sunstar.com.ph/baguio/sports/luyk-playing-q
Page 132, Position 3: There are at least 27 million slaves in the world today, more than were ever seized from Africa in the 400 years of the slave trade.: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-simmons/27-million-slaves_b_290057.html
Page 132, Position 4: Slaves in America in 1850 cost the equivalent of $40,000. The going rate today is $90.: http://business.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/07/cost-of-slaves-falls-to-historic-low/
Page 133, Position 1: More than 80% of the world’s population takes caffeine, in tea, coffee or cola, every day.: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110407171728.htm
Page 133, Position 2: There is one and a half times more caffeine in milk chocolate than in Coca-Cola.: http://productnutrition.thecoca-colacompany.com/articles/caffeine#what-is-caffeine
Page 133, Position 3: A lethal dose of chocolate for a human being is about 22lb or 40 bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. A single M&M is enough to kill a small songbird.: BBC Focus Magazine
Page 133, Position 4: Oliver Cromwell died of malaria.: http://www.olivercromwell.org/faqs8.htm
Page 134, Position 1: To keep someone to prison in the UK costs £45,000 a year: one and a half times as much as it would take to send them to Eton.: http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/uploads/documents/prisonbriefingsmall.pdf"http://www.etoncollege.com/currentfees.aspx
Page 134, Position 2: Fictional Old Etonians include James Bond, Captain Hook, BertieWooster,Tarzan’s father, and Mr Darcy from Bridget Jones’s Diary.: http://www.etoncollege.com/FictionalOEs.aspx
Page 134, Position 3: St Brigid of Ireland, the 6th-century abbess of Kildare, was noted for the miracle of transforming her used bathwater into beer for visiting clerics.: http://www.beerhistory.com/library/holdings/patron_saints.shtml
Page 134, Position 4: It costs more to make the cardboard box that Shredded Wheat comes in than it does to make the Shredded Wheat itself.: The QI Elf responsible refuses to divulge his source.
Page 135, Position 1: The word botulism comes from the Latin botulus, meaning ‘a stomach full of delicacies’. Half a pound of botulinum toxin is enough to kill the entire human population of the world.: http://www.ccwhc.ca/wildlife_health_topics/botulism/essayonbotulism.php
Page 135, Position 2: Botox is made from botulinum toxin. Almost all the botox in the world is made in a single factory in Ireland.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/feb/05/botox-westport-co-mayo-allergan
Page 135, Position 3: The average British woman spends £100,000 on make-up in a lifetime.: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/business-consumer/survey-reveals-women-splash-out-1109170
Page 135, Position 4: All blue-eyed people are mutants. The first ones appeared as recently as 5,000 years ago.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3323607/Blue-eyes-result-of-ancient-genetic-mutation.html
Page 136, Position 1: The scaly anteater, the banded anteater and the spiny anteater are not anteaters even though they all eat ants and are called anteaters.: Encyclopedia Britannica (1994)
Page 136, Position 2: In the 1950s, to allow babies of students at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to enter the premises, they were re-defined as cats.: New Scientist, 29 January 2005
Page 136, Position 3: William E. Boeing, founder of United Airlines, had a pet Pekingese called General Motors.: http://www.invernessroyal.highland.sch.uk/CDT/Aidan/page2.html
Page 136, Position 4: General Electric is the only company remaining from the original Dow Jones index of 1896. Since then it has had fewer than half as many CEOs (4) as the Vatican has had popes (10).: http://www.ge.com/company/history/past_leaders.html
Page 137, Position 1: A basterly gullion is ‘a bastard’s bastard’.: Francis Grose and Samuel Pegge, A Glossary of Provincial and Local Words Used in England (1839) p. 9.
Page 137, Position 2: Batology is the study of blackberries.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 137, Position 3: Botony means ‘having three knobs’.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 137, Position 4: Swindon has the lowest demand for Viagra of any town in the UK.: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/847550-erectile-dysfunction-hotspots-in-the-uk-revealed
Page 138, Position 1: The mute swan is not mute.: http://www.swanlifeline.org.uk/mute_swan.html
Page 138, Position 2: Engastration is the stuffing of one bird with another.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 138, Position 3: Cows eat only grass but have 25,000 taste buds: two and a half times as many as humans.: Irwin Allen Dyer and Elsayed Saad Eldin Hafez, Animal Growth and Nutrition"(1969) p. 131.
Page 138, Position 4: In American Samoa, it is illegal to beg with the aid of a public address system.: http://ip-208-109-238-104.ip.secureserver.net/viewstory.php?storyid=13254
Page 139, Position 1: A new owl species is discovered approximately every ten years.: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/5901/new-owl-species-discovered-phillipines; A. L. A. Middleton and Christopher M, Perrins, New Encyclopedia of Birds (1985)"Though there has been a spate of recent owl discoveries.
Page 139, Position 2: An adult produces enough hydrogen in their urine each year to drive a car 2,700 kilometres.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11468145
Page 139, Position 3: In 2012, the population of Facebook passed 1 billion. If it were a country, it would be the 3rd-largest in the world.: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/13/facebook-users-1-billion-icrossing_n_1204948.html
Page 139, Position 4: Before the Renaissance, three-quarters of all the books in the world were in Chinese.: Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology (1976)
Page 140, Position 1: About 200,000 academic journals are published in English each year. The average number of readers per article is five.: Independent on Sunday, 21 July 1996
Page 140, Position 2: The average numbers of readers of any given published scientific paper is said to be 0.6.: Bernard Haisch, God Theory, The: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind It All (2009) p. 85.
Page 140, Position 3: There are twocs in the word Icelandic, but there is no letterc in the Icelandic language.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_alphabet
Page 140, Position 4: Katujjiqatigiittiarnirlu is Inuktitut for ‘simplicity’.: http://www.gov.nu.ca/files/Language.pdf
Page 141, Position 1: A barnacle’s penis can be up to 20 times the length of its body.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16971-penis-length-isnt-everything--for-barnacle-males.html
Page 141, Position 2: 27,000 trees are felled each day for toilet paper.: http://www.worldwatch.org/taxonomy/term/41
Page 141, Position 3: The average lavatory seat is much cleaner than the average toothbrush. Your teeth are home to 10,000 million bacteria per square centimetre.: Nicholas Bakalar, Where the Germs Are: A Scientific Safari"(2003) p. 59.
Page 141, Position 4: The pleasant smell of earth after rain is caused by bacteria in the soil and is called petrichor – from Greek petros, ‘stone’ and ichor, ‘the fluid that flows through the veins of the gods’.: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-pet2.htm
Page 142, Position 1: The muscles that close a crocodile’s jaws exert a force equivalent to a truck falling off a cliff, but the muscles that open them are so weak that they can be kept shut by a rubber band.: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/built-for-the-kill/articles/crocodile-facts/
Page 142, Position 2: The Royal Mail spends £1 million a year on a billion red rubber bands. British postmen use 2 million of them every day.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-mail/8335555/Red-rubber-band-litter-costing-Royal-Mail-2840-a-day.html
Page 142, Position 3: A hammerhead shark can be rendered completely immobile for 15 minutes by turning it over and tickling its tummy.: http://www.science.fau.edu/sharklab/pdfs/ykvcs02.pdf
Page 142, Position 4: Tümmler is German for a bottle-nosed dolphin.: http://translation.babylon.com/german/to-english/Tummler/
Page 143, Position 1: 99% of Austrians are German, though most Austrians insist that they aren’t.: Debra Clapson (ed) The Ultimate Pocket Book of the World: Atlas and Factfile"(1996)
Page 143, Position 2: Austrians like to claim that Hitler was really a German, whereas Mozart was an Austrian, when the reverse is true.: Adam Jolly (ed) European Business Handbook 2003 (2003) p. 89.
Page 143, Position 3: Beethoven was of Belgian extraction.: Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music (1969) p. 89.
Page 143, Position 4: There are no moles in Ireland.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7335006.stm
Page 144, Position 1: If all the asteroids in the Solar System were lumped together, they’d be smaller than the Moon.: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Asteroids&Display=OverviewLong
Page 144, Position 2: There are six vehicles and 50 tonnes of litter on the Moon left behind by the Apollo missions.: Reader's Digest Book of Facts (1995) p. 400.
Page 144, Position 3: Because there is no weather on the Moon, the footprints of the 12 men who walked on it are still there.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2058614/Moon-tourists-given-guidelines-Nasa-bid-preserve-Apollo-landing-sites.html
Page 144, Position 4: Most astronauts become two inches taller in space.: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/F_How_Youve_Grown_5-8.html
Page 145, Position 1: Google earns $20 billion a year from advertising, more than the primetime revenues of CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX combined.: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781594202353/Ken-Auletta/Googled
Page 145, Position 2: 69% of people in the rear of an aeroplane survive crashes, compared to 49% at the front.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/8660254/How-to-survive-a-plane-crash.html
Page 145, Position 3: 20% of people in the UK believe they have a food allergy, but only 2% actually do.: http://www.bakersfederation.org.uk/nutrition-and-health/allergy-and-intolerance.html
Page 145, Position 4: The American secret service tried to spike Hitler’s carrots with female hormones to change him into a woman.: Bruce Felton, What Were They Thinking? New and Revised: Really Bad Ideas Throughout History (2007) p. 41.
Page 146, Position 1: Almost 2,000 carrot seeds will fit into a teaspoon.: http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/cultivation.html
Page 146, Position 2: An estimated 18 million spoons, together weighing as much as four blue whales, go missing in Melbourne every year.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925402.800-feedback.html
Page 146, Position 3: Melbourne used to be called Batmania.: http://www.onlymelbourne.com.au/trivia_archive.php
Page 146, Position 4: Alice, the 3rd-largest town in Australia’s Northern Territory, used to be called Stuart.: http://www.alicesprings.nt.gov.au/alice-springs/history
Page 147, Position 1: 40% of all bottled water sold in the world is bottled tap water.: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lgb/?page_id=534
Page 147, Position 2: The Antarctic is a continent entirely surrounded by oceans; the Arctic is an ocean almost entirely surrounded by continents.: Times Atlas of the World
Page 147, Position 3: The average American absorbs 34gb of information a day, though half of it is obtained from playing video games.: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/technology/10data.html
Page 147, Position 4: Half the Saxon aristocracy were killed at the battle of Hastings in 1066.: A History of Britain written and presented by Simon Schama (BBC2)
Page 148, Position 1: More than twice as many people are killed by vending machines as by sharks.: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/04/AR2010080403047.html
Page 148, Position 2: Placebos are 30% more effective as an antidote for depression than drugs.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181672/
Page 148, Position 3: If a tree were planted for each Coca-Cola sold, we could reforest the Earth in three years.: http://www.weforest.org/
Page 148, Position 4: The inventor of ‘best before’ dates, originally for milk, was Al Capone’s brother, Ralph.: Capone, Deirdre Marie, Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story from Inside His Family (Recaplodge LLC, 2010), p. 43â€“44
Page 149, Position 1: After his wife’s death, a heart-broken Benjamin Disraeli found that she’d kept all the hair from the haircuts she’d given him in 33 years of marriage.: A. G. Gardiner and James Sykes, Mary Anne Disraeli Or the Story of Viscountess Beaconsfield (2003) p. 104.
Page 149, Position 2: Elizabeth Taylor lived to be 79 but she never learned to boil an egg.: Clemens David Heymann, Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor"(1995) p. 101.
Page 149, Position 3: The Perthshire village of Dull is planning to twin with Boring, Oregon.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/25/silly-placenames-dull-and-boring
Page 149, Position 4: More than 50% of koalas have chlamydia.: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/05/koala-rescue/jenkins-text
Page 150, Position 1: Ants can survive in a microwave: they are small enough to dodge the rays.: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/1743/
Page 150, Position 2: Anthophobia is the fear of flowers.: http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=12193
Page 150, Position 3: The Greek national anthem has 158 verses, but only two of them are ever sung.: http://www.nationalanthems.me/greece-hymn-to-liberty/
Page 150, Position 4: The national anthem of Spain has no words.: http://www.nationalanthems.me/spain-marcha-real/
Page 151, Position 1: Prince Charles is the longest-serving heir to the throne in British history. He has held the position for 60 years.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/20/prince-charles-longest-serving-heir-throne
Page 151, Position 2: Some parts of Antarctica have had no rain or snow for 2 million years.: Linda Aspen-Baxter, Continents - Antarctica (2006) p. 13.
Page 151, Position 3: Bubblewrap was first produced in a New Jersey garage in 1957. Its inventors were trying to make easy-wipe textured wallpaper.: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/24/bubble-wrap-celebrates-50_n_434685.html
Page 151, Position 4: There is no such thing as a vegetarian snake. Snakes eat nothing except other animals.: http://pet-snakes.com/vegetarian-snakes
Page 152, Position 1: For 249 years, the tallest building in the world was Lincoln Cathedral.: https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Lincoln_Cathedral.html
Page 152, Position 2: Angel Falls, Venezuela, is 17 times higher than Niagara.: http://www.worldwaterfalldatabase.com/waterfall/Kerepakupai-Meru-1/
Page 152, Position 3: A typical bird’s feathers weigh more than twice as much as its bones.: http://www.hsu.edu/pictures.aspx?id=1287
Page 152, Position 4: Only 35% of the average person’s Twitter followers are actual people.: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-much-of-twitter-is-spam
Page 153, Position 1: ‘Day dapple’ is an old Irish term for the time of day when a person can no longer be distinguished from a bush.: http://www.research.vt.edu/resmag/1999resmag/night.html
Page 153, Position 2: The ancient Greek for ostrich is strouthokamelos, or ‘sparrow-camel’.: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ostrich
Page 153, Position 3: ‘Influenza’ is Italian for ‘influence’: heavenly bodies were once thought to affect our own.: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep/19-dark-matter-of-the-human-brain
Page 153, Position 4: San Marino has eight times as many doctors per person as any other country in the world.: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_phy_per_1000_peo-physicians-per-1-000-people
Page 154, Position 1: Humans have been hunter-gatherers for 99% of their history.: http://www.nd.edu/~dnarvaez/documents/Narvaez99percent2012FINAL.pdf
Page 154, Position 2: Ostriches can be trained to herd sheep.: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19660417&id=EEUaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=0icEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7286,3172928
Page 154, Position 3: The French for ‘badger’ is blaireau, which also means ‘shaving brush’.: http://translate.google.com/#fr/en/blaireau%0A
Page 154, Position 4: WTF is the acronym of the World Taekwondo Federation.: http://www.wtf.org/wtf_eng/main/main_eng.html
Page 155, Position 1: In 2011, the Internet reached 13.7 billion pages: one for every year since the Big Bang.: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
Page 155, Position 2: The entire Internet weighs about the same as one large strawberry.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/8865093/Internet-weighs-the-same-as-a-strawberry.html
Page 155, Position 3: A male right whale is half the size of a male blue whale but has testes five times bigger: each one weighs as much as a large horse.: Phil Clapham, Right Whales (2004) p. 45.
Page 155, Position 4: Ted Turner owns 50,000 bison.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6953161/Ted-Turner-and-Native-Americans-in-row-over-fate-of-Yellowstone-Bison.html
Page 156, Position 1: Kestrels can locate voles from the sky because of ultra-violet light reflected by their urine.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14519632.400-voles-urine-is-their-downfall.html
Page 156, Position 2: Henry VIII had a Groom of the Stool whose duty was to see that ‘the house of easement be sweet and clear’: in other words, to wipe the king’s bottom.: Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety (1995) p. 20.
Page 156, Position 3: Sitting on the lavatory for eight hours uses the same number of calories as one hour’s jogging.: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/calories.php?WeightPounds=&WeightKg=80&exertype=&highcal=0&minutes=60&order=CalsBurned+DESC
Page 156, Position 4: It was 33 years after loo paper was invented in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that it could finally be advertised as ‘splinter free’.: http://www.quiltednorthern.com/fun/history.html
Page 157, Position 1: Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3558694.stm
Page 157, Position 2: Steve Jobs was half Syrian. His annual salary as CEO of Apple was $1.: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-01-10/news/28428732_1_apple-market-value-base-salary
Page 157, Position 3: ‘Forty’ is the only number in English that has its letters in alphabetical order.: That forty is the only number whose letters are in alphabetical order is one of those self-evident facts - once you hear it, at least. Checking all of the other numbers in the universe is left as an exercise for the reader.
Page 157, Position 4: 43 million £1 coins currently in circulation are forgeries.: http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/counterfeit-one-pound-coins
Page 158, Position 1: Since 2012, all new 5p and 10p coins issued by the Royal Mint have been magnetic.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/banking/7979997/New-steel-5p-and-10p-coins-a-disaster.html
Page 158, Position 2: The highest-value notes issued by the Bank of England are Giants (£1 million) and Titans (£100 million).: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Pages/about/scottish_northernireland.aspx
Page 158, Position 3: The chemical name for titin, the world’s largest known protein, is 189,819 letters long.: Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon (2011) p. 36.
Page 158, Position 4: In Japan, Tintin is called Tantan because Tintin is pronounced ‘Chin-Chin’ and means ‘penis’.: http://www.fark.com/comments/1251355/Study-concludes-beloved-comicbook-character-Tintin-suffered-from-hormone-deficiency-concussions
Page 159, Position 1: Kim Il-Sung, founder of North Korea, was born on the day the Titanic sank.: http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49806
Page 159, Position 2: Kim Il-Sung’s grandson, Jong-Nam, was sacked as heir after being arrested trying to enter Japan on a false passport to visit Disneyland.: http://articles.cnn.com/2012-01-17/asia/world_asia_north-korea-kim-other-son_1_kim-jong-nam-eldest-son-reforms?_s=PM:ASIA
Page 159, Position 3: In the last 60 years, more than 23,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea. Only two Koreans have gone in the opposite direction.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/29/north-korea-defector-returns-south
Page 159, Position 4: Korea is Finnish for ‘gorgeous’.: Ilkka Rekiaro and Douglas Robinson (eds) Suomi Englanti Suomi Finnish English Finnish Dictionary (1989)
Page 160, Position 1: The exchange rate in Vietnam is about 20,000 dongs to the dollar.: http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert/?Amount=1&From=USD&To=VND
Page 160, Position 2: It costs the US mint over 11 cents to make each 5-cent coin.: http://www.usmint.gov/faqs/circulating_coins/index.cfm?action=faq_circulating_coin
Page 160, Position 3: ‘Hey Jingo!’ is a conjuror’s call for something to appear – the opposite of ‘Hey Presto!’ which calls for it to be gone.: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=jingo&searchmode=none
Page 160, Position 4: Between 1917 and 1940, the cure for patients with syphilis was to give them malaria.: http://scientopia.org/blogs/whitecoatunderground/2010/09/14/syphilis-malaria-and-other-oddities/
Page 161, Position 1: Gatwick, the name of the UK’s 2nd-largest airport, means ‘the farm where goats are kept’.: http://www.localhistories.org/names.html
Page 161, Position 2: During the 2010 World Cup, 100 bar staff at the pub chain Clover Taverns changed their names to Wayne Rooney. The company has since gone bankrupt.: http://www.punchtaverns.com/Punch/Corporate/About+us/Real+Punch/Clover+Taverns.htm"http://insolventcompanies.com/clover-taverns-limited/
Page 161, Position 3: In 2007, Robert Stewart of Ayr was put on the Sex Offenders Register for having sex with a bicycle.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7095134.stm
Page 161, Position 4: In 1993, Karl Watkins of Redditch, Worcestershire, was jailed for having sex with pavements.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580899/Man-arrested-for-having-sex-with-lamp-post.html
Page 162, Position 1: There is at least ten times as much crime on TV as there is in the real world.: http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=8172
Page 162, Position 2: Starbucks offers 87,000 different drinks combinations.: http://starbucks.co.uk/menu/beverage-list/espresso-beverages
Page 162, Position 3: Britons eat 97% of the world’s baked beans.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/may/19/foodanddrink.uk
Page 162, Position 4: The last private resident of 10 Downing Street was called Mr Chicken.: http://www.number10.gov.uk/history-and-tour/the-emergence-of-downing-street/
Page 163, Position 1: Almost half of all Americans today are classified as ‘living in poverty’ or ‘barely scraping by’. 46.4% pay no income tax.: http://resourcelibrary.gcyf.org/taxonomy/term/13115?page=8
Page 163, Position 2: The US has more lawyers per capita than any country in the world and twice as many prisoners as lawyers.: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_country_in_the_world_has_most_lawyers_per_capita
Page 163, Position 3: The US has only 5% of the world’s population, but almost 25% of its prison population.: http://www.economist.com/node/21555611
Page 163, Position 4: Since smoking was banned in 2004, the main currency in US prisons is mackerel.: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/03/currency
Page 164, Position 1: Prisoners waiting to be executed on Death Row in America are given a physical beforehand, to ensure they are fit enough to die.: http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/region_indian_river_county/vero_beach/david-alan-gore-execution-details-of-serial-killers-final-hours-before-scheduled-lethal-injection
Page 164, Position 2: In his last week on Earth, Troy Davis, who was executed in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2011, was put on ‘death watch’ to stop him taking his own life.: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/09/troy-davis-execution-final-hours.html
Page 164, Position 3: The Death House at the State Prison in Huntsville, Texas, offers wheelchair access.: http://www.langleycreations.com/photo/deathpenalty/huntsville/walls-h.jpg
Page 164, Position 4: An estimated 150,000 people die in the UK every year because only 7% of Britons know how to give first aid.: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/111741
Page 165, Position 1: When a Navajo baby laughs aloud for the first time, the family throws a party. The person who made the baby laugh provides the food.: http://webweekly.hms.harvard.edu/archive/2004/12_13/student_scene.html
Page 165, Position 2: The air breathed by a single person in an 80-year lifetime weighs more than a fully laden Boeing 747.: http://www.spokanecleanair.org/documents/kids_pages/Kids%20Page%20Air.pdf"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-8
Page 165, Position 3: 1968 was the only year of the 20th century in which no member of the British armed services was killed on active service.: http://www.ppu.org.uk/whitepoppy/red_legion1.html
Page 165, Position 4: The London Underground has made more money from its famous map than it ever has from running trains.: Stephen Halliday, London Underground Facts (2012) p. 93.
Page 166, Position 1: In 2010, the Italian government had a fleet of 629,000 official cars: ten times as many as the US government.: http://www.economist.com/node/16102798
Page 166, Position 2: Since its discovery in 1930, Pluto has travelled only a third of its way round the Sun.: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/plutofact.html
Page 166, Position 3: Walter Schirra is the only one of the first six Americans in space not to have one of the Tracy brothers in Thunderbirds named after him.: Phil Dolling and James May, James May's Magnificent Machines (2012)
Page 166, Position 4: Sucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission in ancient Ireland.: http://www.archaeology.org/1005/bogbodies/clonycavan_croghan.html
Page 167, Position 1: In Vanuatu pidgin, Prince Charles is known as nambawan pikinini blong Missus Kwin and a helicopter is a mixmaster blong Jesus Christ.: http://www.vanuatuatoz.com
Page 167, Position 2: In 1995, the number of TV programmes in Britain watched by over 15 million people was 225. By 2004, this had fallen to six.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/dec/13/broadcasting.uknews
Page 167, Position 3: In Romany, the word for television is dínilo’s dikkaméngro or ‘fool’s looking-box’.: http://www.freelang.net/online/romani.php?lg=gb
Page 167, Position 4: In the film industry, a ‘mickey’ is a gentle camera move forwards. It’s short for ‘Mickey Rooney’ (a ‘little creep’).: http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/lights-camera-action/content?oid=12812
Page 168, Position 1: Bacteria and amoebas are far more different from each other than amoebas are from people.: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/1/pdf/l_051_35.pdf
Page 168, Position 2: Two-thirds of all the people in the world who have ever lived to be 65 are still alive today.: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2011/01/30/no-more-gold-watches-baby-boomers-and-retirement/
Page 168, Position 3: There are 10,000 times as many photographs on Facebook as there are in the US Library of Congress.: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/facebook-stores-10000x-more-photos-than-the-library-of-congress-20110920/
Page 168, Position 4: Eight of the Earth’s 88 naturally occurring chemical elements were discovered in the same mine in Sweden.: http://www.grad.ucl.ac.uk/comp/2010-2011/research/gallery/index.pht?entryID=60
Page 169, Position 1: The Malay word for water is ‘air’.: http://translate.google.com/#ms/en/air
Page 169, Position 2: Kummerspeck (‘grief bacon’) is German for the weight put on from eating too much when feeling sorry for yourself.: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kummerspeck
Page 169, Position 3: The Finnish word for pedant, pilkunnussija, translates literally as ‘comma fucker’.: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pilkunnussija
Page 169, Position 4: When he died in 1891, John Davey, a schoolmaster of Zennor, Cornwall, was the only person in the world that spoke Cornish. He had kept the language alive by talking to his cat.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/3619083/Notebook.html
Page 170, Position 1: The first Olympian disqualified for banned substances was Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall of Sweden. In the 1968 Mexico Games, he had two beers to calm his nerves before the pistol shooting.: http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/tarnished-gold-a-look-back-in-anger-at-some-of-the-great-olympics-cheats-7869830.html
Page 170, Position 2: The first recorded incidence of air rage involved a passenger in First Class who shat on the food trolley after being refused another drink.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/721533/Would-you-fly-with-this-man.html
Page 170, Position 3: More than a third of the world’s 43,794 airports are in the USA.: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html"https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html
Page 170, Position 4: The world’s largest cattle station, Anna Creek Station in South Australia, is larger than the state of Israel.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/2104470/Big-Dry-drought-closes-worlds-biggest-cattle-ranch-Anna-Creek-in-Australia.html
Page 171, Position 1: All ten species of the most venomous snakes in the world live in Australia.: Timothy Summers, Fangs of the Serpent (2000) p. 25.
Page 171, Position 2: Powerful acids in snakes’ stomachs mean they will explode if given Alka-Seltzer.: Please don't try this at home, but if you're an expert on herpetological digestion, then please get in touch, as the team is split as to whether this would actually work.
Page 171, Position 3: The cost of fighting a libel action in the UK is 140 times greater than the European average.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/19/no-win-no-fee-lawyers-shackling-newspapers
Page 171, Position 4: After the battle of Waterloo, the Marquis of Anglesey had his leg amputated. It was buried with full military honours in a nearby garden.: http://www.carrickhill.sa.gov.au/house_hallway.html
Page 172, Position 1: Folk healers in the Andes diagnose patients with guinea pigs, which apparently squeak when close to the source of the problem.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/pets/guinea_pig.shtml; The Elves wonder if the doctor just squeezes the guinea pig when he gets to a likely part of the body.
Page 172, Position 2: In 2003, six monkeys were funded by the Arts Council of England to see how long it would take them to type the works of Shakespeare. After six months, they had failed to produce a single word of English, broken the computer and used the keyboard as a lavatory.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8789894/Monkeys-at-typewriters-close-to-reproducing-Shakespeare.html
Page 172, Position 3: In 2001, seven Chilean poets held a reading in the baboon enclosure of Santiago Zoo to demonstrate that baboons are more receptive to poetry than the average Chilean.: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_476651.html?menu=3D
Page 173, Position 1: By 2020, the number of men of marriageable age in China will outnumber the women by 30 million.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6254763.stm
Page 173, Position 2: Leo Tolstoy’s wife wrote out the drafts of War and Peace for him, in longhand, six times.: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/12/14/091214crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=all
Page 173, Position 3: Zeus had five wives. One of them was his aunt, another was his elder sister and a 3rd one he ate.: http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanisMetis.html
Page 173, Position 4: In 1672, an angry mob of Dutchmen killed and ate their prime minister.: The Times, 21 August 2005
Page 174, Position 1: Half of the world’s black pepper is produced in Vietnam.: http://vccinews.com/news_detail.asp?news_id=3344
Page 174, Position 2: Feeding canaries red peppers turns them orange.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/any-colour-you-like-597245.html
Page 174, Position 3: The name Canary Islands comes from the Latin for ‘Isle of Dogs’.: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=canary
Page 174, Position 4: Cat originally meant ‘dog’. The word comes from the Latin catulus, a small dog or puppy.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 175, Position 1: White rhinos and black rhinos are the same colour.: http://www.savingrhinos.org/RhinoSpecies/BlackRhinoSpecies.pdf
Page 175, Position 2: Highways in the western USA are based on the migratory routes of bison.: http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/x221547391/Wood-bison-history-has-great-influence-on-area
Page 175, Position 3: The Alpine salamander’s pregnancy can last for over three years.: http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/photos/12-animals-with-the-longest-gestation-period/black-alpine-salamanders
Page 175, Position 4: Dragonflies flap their wings in a figure-of-eight motion.: Richard Mabey and Peter Marren, Bugs Britannica (2010 ) p. 131.
Page 176, Position 1: In Bali, dragonflies are eaten with coconut milk, ginger, garlic, shallots – or just plain-grilled and crispy.: http://www.bali-travel-life.com/bali-food.html
Page 176, Position 2: Salvador Dalí was terrified of grasshoppers. As a schoolboy, he threw such violent fits of hysteria that his teacher forbade them to be mentioned in class.: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/dali.html
Page 176, Position 3: Kali is the Hindu goddess of death, violence, sexuality and motherly love.: http://www.goddess.ws/kali.html
Page 176, Position 4: The name Mali means ‘hippopotamus’ in Bamanankan, the main language of the country.: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~rebecca/RTC_Bamana.pdf
Page 177, Position 1: The Nigerian navy has four warships whose names all mean ‘hippopotamus’ but in different local languages: NNS Erinomi (hippo in Yoruba), NNS Enyimiri (hippo in Igbo), NNS Dorina (hippo in Hausa) and NNS Otobo (hippo in Idoma, Ijaw, Igbani and Kalabari).: http://www.nigerianafcsc.org/DOCS/NN%20HISTORY,%20ROLES%20AND%20ORGANISATION.pdf
Page 177, Position 2: Over the years, the Royal Navy’s fleet has included HMS Seagull, HMS Keith, HMS Tortoise, HMSWensleydale and HMS Cockchafer.: http://www.sailingnavies.com/show_ships.php?nid=1
Page 177, Position 3: A baby cockroach is called a ‘nymph’.: http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/housingandclothing/dk1003.html
Page 177, Position 4: When Escoffier was head chef at the Carlton Hotel in London, he got his English clientele to eat frogs’ legs by slipping them on to the menu as Nymphs of the Dawn.: Elizabeth Riely, A Culinary Dictionary The Chef's Companion (2003) p. 210.
Page 178, Position 1: As a young man in London in 1914, Ho Chi Minh worked for Escoffier as a trainee pastry chef.: Kenneth James, Escoffier: The King of Chefs (2006) p. 248.
Page 178, Position 2: The South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar was, at various times, president of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.: http://www.bolivarmo.com/history.htm
Page 178, Position 3: Venezuela is Spanish for ‘Little Venice’.: http://www.geographia.com/venezuela/history.htm
Page 178, Position 4: In 17th-century Venice, women’s high-heeled shoes could be more than 12 inches tall.: The Daily Telegraph, 12 March 2008
Page 179, Position 1: Beckets n. The little loops for a belt on a pair of trousers or a raincoat.: http://www.royal-navy.mod.uk/static/pages/4743.html
Page 179, Position 2: Callypygian adj. Having beautiful buttocks.: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/callipygian
Page 179, Position 3: Misophonia n. Irrational rage and terror caused by the sound of people eating.: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06annoy.html?_r=0
Page 179, Position 4: Sciapodous adj. Having feet large enough to be used as umbrellas.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 180, Position 1: The composer Arnold Schoenberg was superstitious about the number 13. As 7+6=13 he feared he would die aged 76. And he did: on Friday 13th July, at 13 minutes to midnight.: Tony Allan, Prophecies: 4,000 Years of Prophets, Visionaries and Predictions (2009)
Page 180, Position 2: William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus, lived to be 84 – the same number of years that Uranus takes to orbit the Sun.: http://www.williamherschel.org.uk/
Page 180, Position 3: Asked by a priest, ‘Do you forgive your enemies?’ the dying Spanish general Ramón Blanco y Erenas (1833–1906) answered, ‘No. I don’t have any enemies. I’ve had them all shot.’: Laura Ward, Famous Last Words (2004) p. 100.
Page 180, Position 4: In 2007, a Bosnian called Amir Vehabovic faked his own death to see how many people would go to his funeral. Only his mother turned up.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/mar/24/topstories3.mainsection
Page 181, Position 1: Baby koalas are weaned on their mother’s excrement. It is consumed directly from their mother’s bottom in the form of ‘soup’.: http://www.aszk.org.au/docs/koala.pdf
Page 181, Position 2: In Antigua, lizard soup is considered an effective cure for asthma – provided the patient isn’t told what’s in it.: http://www.antiguaobserver.com/time-to-go-back-to-basics
Page 181, Position 3: The world’s largest known crocodile and the world’s smallest man are from the same island in the Philippines.: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/is-this-monster-crocodile-the-biggest-of-all-time/"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/8572514/The-worlds-shortest-man-Junrey-Balawing-and-the-previous-record-holders.html
Page 181, Position 4: The Aztecs sacrificed 1% of their population every year, or about 250,000 people. They also sacrificed eagles, jaguars, butterflies and hummingbirds.: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/aztecs/sacrifice.htm
Page 182, Position 1: Hummingbirds have 2,000 meals a day and hibernate every night.: http://www.avianweb.com/rubythroatedhummingbirdfeeding.html
Page 182, Position 2: Seahorses are the only fish with a neck and the only family of animals where the male gives birth.: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080501125451.htm"http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-sea-horse-got-curves
Page 182, Position 3: Crocodiles have no lips and can hold their breath for an hour.: http://www.discoverwildlife.com/animals/king-crocodile"http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14519612.900-why-crocodiles-rarely-come-up-for-air.html
Page 182, Position 4: The Cornish for ‘breath’ is anal.: http://www.ceantar.org/Dicts/MB2/mb01.html
Page 183, Position 1: Whenever the king of Swaziland rises from his seat, he must be greeted with cheers and gasps of astonished admiration.: Edward Fox, Obscure Kingdoms (1995)
Page 183, Position 2: In 1875, the king of Fiji brought back measles from a state visit to Australia and wiped out a quarter of his own people.: http://www.pacifichealthdialog.org.fj/Volume%205/No1%20Emerging%20and%20Re-Emerging%20Diseases%20in%20the%20Pacific/Review%20Papers/Measles%20in%20Fiji%201875%20thoughts%20on%20the%20history%20of%20emerging%20infectious%20diseases.pdf
Page 183, Position 3: Queen Elizabeth I often drank two pints of strong beer for breakfast.: Martin Plant and Moira Plant, Binge Britain - Alcohol and the National Response (2006)
Page 183, Position 4: After weekend house parties at Sandringham, King Edward VII insisted on weighing his guests to make sure they had eaten well.: Jeremy Paxman, Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British (2012) Ch. 11
Page 184, Position 1: Lithuanian men are 200 times more likely to kill themselves than Jamaican men are.: http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide_rates/en/
Page 184, Position 2: Nigeria makes more movies every year than the US.: http://www.economistgroupmedia.com/products/the-economist/editorial-calendar/holiday-double/
Page 184, Position 3: Only three members of the United Nations have failed to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: South Sudan, Somalia and the USA.: http://www.unicef.org/sowc2012/pdfs/SOWC-2012-The-Convention-on-the-Rights-of-the-Child.pdf
Page 184, Position 4: Bacteria can only live for three hours on Croatia’s currency, the Kuna, but for more than a day on the Romanian Leu.: New Scientist 14/09/2013
Page 185, Position 1: Iceland was once called ‘Butterland’ because the grass was so rich it seemed to drip butter.: Jane Simmonds, Iceland (1999) p. 28.
Page 185, Position 2: After Switzerland, the world’s largest per capita gold reserves are held by Lebanon.: http://beirutspring.com/blog/2011/04/27/lebanon-has-the-worlds-second-largest-gold-reserve-per-person/
Page 185, Position 3: There are more than 35 places called Lebanon in the USA, at least 38 Springfields, and no fewer than 50 Greenvilles.: http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnispublic/f?p=132:1:2505547100681440
Page 185, Position 4: Boots fitted with springs were forbidden by the original Queensberry Rules for boxing.: http://www.victorianalrp.co.uk/docs/Marquess_of_Queensbury_Rules.pdf
Page 186, Position 1: Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables has a sentence that is 823 words long, separated by 93 commas and 51 semicolons.: Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr, James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (2011) p. 70.
Page 186, Position 2: When Les Misérables was first published in 1862, Hugo sent a snappish telegram to his publisher to ask how it was selling. The whole thing read, ‘?’ The publisher’s reply was effusive, ‘!’: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writerdetails.asp?cid=30497
Page 186, Position 3: Ernest Hemingway’s mother was so ashamed of his novel The Sun Also Rises that, when it was scheduled for discussion at her book club, she refused to go.: Michael Reynolds and Frederick Voss, Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time (1999) p. 53.
Page 186, Position 4: Within 200 yards of the flat in Islington where George Orwell had the idea for 1984, there are now 32 CCTV cameras.: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/george-orwell-big-brother-is-watching-your-house-7086271.html
Page 187, Position 1: In 2008, an MI6 officer appeared on The One Show. Halfway through, his moustache fell off.: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/upper_lip_unsticky_but_stiff_at_mi6/
Page 187, Position 2: Hitler’s press secretary didn’t approve of his moustache. ‘Stop worrying about it,’ said the Führer. ‘If it’s not in fashion now, it will be soon, because I’m wearing one.’: Jerrold M. Post, The Psychological Assessment Of Political Leaders (2005) p. 41.
Page 187, Position 3: The shortest war ever fought was between Britain and Zanzibar on 27th August 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.: http://www.zdvp.com/?Dolphin_Paradise:Zanzibar_History
Page 187, Position 4: When Rameses II’s mummified body was shipped to France in 1974, it was issued with a passport. The mummy’s occupation was given as ‘King (deceased)’.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II
Page 188, Position 1: Barbara Cartland wrote over 600 books. She dictated them to her secretary between one o’clock and half past three in the afternoon, lying on a sofa with a white fur rug and a hot-water bottle.: Brian Roberts, Getting the Most Out of the Research Experience (2007) p. 100.
Page 188, Position 2: Barbara is Latin for ‘strange woman’.: P. G. W. Glare (ed) Oxford Latin Dictionary p. 225
Page 188, Position 3: Barbara Windsor is 4 feet 11 inches tall: the same height as Joan of Arc and Queen Victoria.: http://www.astrotheme.com/heights/4'11"http://humanheight.net/famous_people/sources/height_of_queen_victoria_source.html; Though Queen Vic was only 4'7' by the end of her life.
Page 188, Position 4: In the 1930s, British women working for Directory Enquiries were required to be at least 5 feet 3 inches tall so they could reach the top of the switchboard.: http://www.redhill-reigate-history.co.uk/telephone.htm"http://www.1900s.org.uk/1940s50s-telephone-exchange.htm
Page 189, Position 1: Charles Dickens invented 959 named characters. Before deciding on the name Tiny Tim, he considered Small Sam, Little Larry and Puny Pete.: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/09/us/shylock-to-sherlock-a-study-in-names.html
Page 189, Position 2: Dickens’ shortlist for Martin Chuzzlewit’s surname included Sweetledew, Chuzzletoe, Sweetleback and Sweetlewag.: André Bernard, Now All We Need Is A Title: Famous Book Titles And How They Got That Way (1995) p. 38.
Page 189, Position 3: John Steinbeck used 300 pencils to write his novel East of Eden.: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/05/the-mechanics-of-writing/
Page 189, Position 4: The word pencil comes from a Latin word meaning ‘small penis’.: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pencil
Page 190, Position 1: When trying out a new pen, 97% of people write their own name.: Daily Mail, 7 April 2012
Page 190, Position 2: 90% of everything written in English uses just 1,000 words.: Dr Edward Bernard Fry, How to Teach Reading (2005) p. 44.
Page 190, Position 3: 20% of all road accidents in Sweden involve an elk.: http://www.thelocal.se/6151/20070120/
Page 190, Position 4: 12% of all the Coca-Cola in America is drunk at breakfast.: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/20/business/a-morning-cola-instead-of-coffee.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Page 191, Position 1: Gongoozler n. One who stares for a long time at things happening on a canal.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 191, Position 2: Gossypiboma n. A surgical sponge accidentally left inside a patient’s body.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 191, Position 3: Jentacular adj. Breakfasty; breakfastish; of, or relating to, breakfast.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 191, Position 4: Meupareunia n. Sexual activity enjoyed by only one of the participants.: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meupareunia
Page 192, Position 1: Gorillas can be put on the pill.: Jack Hanna, Jungle Jack: My Wild Life (2008)
Page 192, Position 2: The German for ‘contraceptive’ is Schwangerschaftsverhütungsmittel. By the time you’ve finished saying it, it’s too late.: http://en.bab.la/dictionary/german-english/schwangerschaftsverhuetungsmittel
Page 192, Position 3: On 20th August 1949, time appeared to stand still for several minutes, when hundreds of starlings roosted on the long hand of Big Ben.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4736472/The-mathematics-of-murmurating-starlings.html
Page 192, Position 4: The correct adjective to describe a thrush is turdoid.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 193, Position 1: If a silkworm is exposed to pure carbon dioxide, it crawls around aimlessly, apparently trying to remember what it’s supposed to be doing.: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19540728&id=tAQkAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7iMEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2562,5176111
Page 193, Position 2: Eskimos use refrigerators to stop their food from freezing.: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/26/AR2005042601144.html
Page 193, Position 3: The Sun’s core is so hot that a piece of it the size of a pinhead would give off enough heat to kill a person 160 kilometres away.: http://www.solarspace.co.uk/Sun.php
Page 193, Position 4: Every living thing can be anaesthetised, even plants. Despite their successful use since the mid-19th century, no one really understands how anaesthetics work.: New Scientist, 18 August 1983
Page 194, Position 1: A trained typist’s fingers cover about 16 miles a day.: http://articles.latimes.com/1985-01-10/news/vw-9288_1_typewriter-keyboard
Page 194, Position 2: Every US president with a beard has been Republican.: Leland Gregory, Stupid American History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions (2009) p. 39.
Page 194, Position 3: The Bible is the most shoplifted book in the USA.: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/review/Rabb-t.html
Page 194, Position 4: The world’s biggest frog is bigger than the world’s smallest antelope.: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/
Page 195, Position 1: The dik-dik is a miniature antelope that can go for months without water but dies after a week without salt.: http://www.kenyabeasts.org.uk/threea.htm"http://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/animals/individuals/KirksDikDik.html"http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildfacts/factfiles/print/675.shtml
Page 195, Position 2: One third of all the salt produced in the US is used to melt ice on roads.: http://omp.gso.uri.edu/ompweb/doee/science/physical/chsal10.htm
Page 195, Position 3: British geologists have discovered more of the world’s oil than the geologists of all the other nations put together.: The Elves were given this fact by a geologist and documentary maker but have never been able to trace a printed source. Maybe you can give us evidence one way or the other, if so, please get in touch.
Page 195, Position 4: After being annexed by the British Empire, the sarong-clad Burmese referred to their new overlords as ‘The Trouser People’.: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Trouser-People-Andrew-Marshall/dp/616733918X
Page 196, Position 1: Towards the end of each afternoon, Sir Philip Sassoon (1888–1939) hauled down the Union Jack that flew over his house in case the colours clashed with the sunset.: Professor Peter Stansky, Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil (2003) p. 168.
Page 196, Position 2: Half of Napoleon’s army at the battle of Eylau – 30,000 men – were burglars.: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1975) p. 119.
Page 196, Position 3: The penalty for adultery in ancient Greece involved hammering a radish into the adulterer’s bottom with a mallet. Radishes were a lot longer and pointier in those days.: http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/campion/notes.html
Page 196, Position 4: An octopus can ooze through an opening no bigger than its own eyeball.: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061212-octopus-video.html
Page 197, Position 1: Humans and elephants are the only animals with chins.: Many places say that humans are the only animals with chins, but we've looked at the skulls of elephants and we think they do, too. Can you find any other animals with prominent bone structures below their mouths? Let us know.
Page 197, Position 2: Sir Charles Isham, a vegetarian spiritualist, introduced garden gnomes to England in 1847. He hoped that they would attract real gnomes to his garden.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/36143.stm
Page 197, Position 3: Until the late 15th century, the word ‘girl’ just meant a child. Boys were referred to as ‘knave girls’ and female children were ‘gay girls’.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 197, Position 4: The use of the English word ‘gay’ to mean homosexual is older than the use of the term ‘homosexual’ to mean gay.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 198, Position 1: The Serpentine in London was the first man-made pond in the world designed to look as if it wasn’t man-made.: http://www.amazon.co.uk/At-Home-short-history-private/dp/0385608276
Page 198, Position 2: Albanian has 27 words for different kinds of moustache and 30 for eyebrows.: http://www.britishcouncil.org/burma-library-services-learn-english-online-english-language-article-the-meaning-of-tingo.htm
Page 198, Position 3: In the 9th century, Ireland was called ‘Scotia’ and Scotland was known as ‘Albania’.: http://www.exclassics.com/ceitinn/for51.htm
Page 198, Position 4: Six ten-billionths of the Sun is gold. If the 1,200,000,000,000,000 tonnes of it could be extracted, there would be enough to gild Scotland to the depth of half a mile.: http://www.suntrek.org/hot-solar-atmosphere/solar-fingerprints/gold-sun.shtml
Page 199, Position 1: Beavers have transparent eyelids so they can see underwater with their eyes shut.: Doug Golden, When the Beaver Was the King (2006) p. 6.
Page 199, Position 2: The Old Testament book of Leviticus forbids the eating of cuckoos, ferrets, camels, swans, crabs, frogs, chameleons, eels, hares, snails, lizards, moles, ravens, ospreys, vultures, lobsters, owls, storks, herons, bats, ravens, pelicans, lapwings, prawns and eagles.: King James Version
Page 199, Position 3: 1,000 baby eagles were eaten at the Archbishop of York’s enthronement feast in 1466.: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Food: A History (2001)
Page 199, Position 4: Zeppo Marx, the youngest of the Marx Brothers, designed the clamping device that held the atom bombs in place before they were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.: http://www.historybuff.com/newsletter/janu11.html
Page 200, Position 1: Oprah is ‘Harpo’ backwards. Oprah Winfrey’s real name is Orpah (after the sister of Ruth in the Bible) but no one could say or spell it properly so she eventually gave up correcting them.: Helen S. Garson, Oprah Winfrey: A Biography (2004) p. 12.
Page 200, Position 2: The flowers of the coffee bush smell like jasmine.: http://www.justaboutcoffee.com/index.php?file=coffeetree
Page 200, Position 3: Jasmine is a member of the olive family. Marie is a member of the Osmond family. Her first name is Olive.: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/427445/Oleaceae"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Osmond
Page 200, Position 4: In 1987, American Airlines saved $40,000 by removing an olive from each salad in First Class.: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3073562/ns/business-us_business/t/how-cure-airlines-ills/#.UBpy2DGe7Co
Page 201, Position 1: In an average year in Britain, trousers cause twice as many accidents as chainsaws.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1048492/Youre-daffodil--REALLY-useless-facts-Britains-upmarket-intellectuals.html
Page 201, Position 2: 100,000 mobile phones are dropped down the loo in Britain every year, and 50,000 get run over.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-459831/Mobile-phone-users-flush-away-342-million.html
Page 201, Position 3: People are 1% shorter in the evening than they are in the morning.: Ronald DeWald (ed) Spinal Deformities: The Comprehensive Text (2003) p. 174.
Page 201, Position 4: The Metropolitan Police employs 39% more people than the Royal Navy.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/swine-flu/5893688/Swine-flu-Metropolitan-Police-hit-by-272-cases.html"http://chartingprogress.defra.gov.uk/defence-%E2%80%93-military
Page 202, Position 1: Cranberries bounce when ripe: another name for them is ‘bounceberries’. One that bounces seven times is in perfect condition to eat.: http://www.oceanspray.co.uk/heritage/kew
Page 202, Position 2: Horripilation is another word for getting goosebumps.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 202, Position 3: The technical word for a French kiss is cataglottism.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 202, Position 4: Cockshut is another word for twilight – the time of day when chickens are put to bed.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 203, Position 1: If all the time our eyes are shut when blinking is added together, we spend 1.2 years of our waking lives in pitch darkness.: http://www.dom.uab.edu/pdf/newsletter/2007/May2007newsletter.pdf
Page 203, Position 2: Every time a woodpecker’s beak hits a tree, its head is subject to 1,000 times the force of gravity.: Engineering Materials and Design: Volume 23
Page 203, Position 3: The smallest trees in the world are the dwarf willows of Greenland. They are two inches tall.: http://www.dimensionsinfo.com/smallest-tree/
Page 203, Position 4: The world’s smallest test tube has a diameter 10,000 times narrower than a human hair.: http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/10/15/melting_nano_scale/
Page 204, Position 1: Antarctic islands include Disappointment Island, Fabulous Island, Desolation Island, Monumental Island, Inexpressible Island, Pourquoi Pas Island, Shag Island, Circumcision Island and Shoe Island.: Times Atlas of the World
Page 204, Position 2: In 2008, Usain Bolt set the world record for the 100 metres with one shoelace undone.: http://www.espn.co.uk/london-olympics-2012/sport/player/1626.html
Page 204, Position 3: Every electron in the universe knows about the state of every other electron.: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Universe-Anything-That-Happen/dp/0306819643
Page 204, Position 4: Honeybees always know where the Sun is, even if it’s on the other side of the world.: http://www.fi.edu/time/Journey/Sundials/aboutsd.htm
Page 205, Position 1: The national anthem of Bangladesh includes the lines: ‘The fragrance from your mango groves Makes me wild with joy.’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Shonar_Bangla
Page 205, Position 2: One in three men in Britain of Bangladeshi origin works as a waiter.: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/video/sussexlectures/pdf/shamitsagga.pdf
Page 205, Position 3: Towels are a central part of the culture in Belarus, even appearing on the country’s flag. At a traditional Belarusian wedding, the bride walks to the church dragging a towel.: http://www.belarusguide.com/culture1/visual_arts/Belarusian_rushnik.htm"http://www.todaysmodernbride.com/710-belarusian-wedding-customs.html
Page 205, Position 4: 13% of Belarus is swamp.: http://eng.belarustourism.by/belarus/nature/
Page 206, Position 1: In 2011, a 61-year-old woman gave birth to her own grandson. The baby was conceived with an egg donated by her 35-year-old daughter.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8321904/Woman-gives-birth-to-own-grandson.html
Page 206, Position 2: The American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973.: Robert E. Hales, The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry (2008) p. 1472.
Page 206, Position 3: Sudan is the only country that still has crucifixion as an official form of capital punishment.: http://civilliberty.about.com/od/capitalpunishment/ig/Types-of-Executions/Death-by-Crucifixion.htm
Page 206, Position 4: By the age of 18, the average American child will have seen 200,000 murders on television.: http://hope.journ.wwu.edu/tpilgrim/j190/TVlecture.html
Page 207, Position 1: In German, a Turnbeutelvergesser is a boy who’s too weedy for school sport and ‘forgets’ to bring his gym bag.: http://www.spruecheportal.de
Page 207, Position 2: Schattenparker is German for someone who parks his car in the shade.: http://www.spruecheportal.de
Page 207, Position 3: Depp means ‘twit’ in German.: http://www.dict.cc/german-english/Depp.html
Page 207, Position 4: Thud! the Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, is published in Germany as Klonk!: http://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/06/translation-mysteries/
Page 208, Position 1: The Basque word for ‘cold’ is hotz.: José Ignacio Hualde, Joseba Lakarra and Robert Lawrence Trask, Towards a History of the Basque Language (1995) p. 192.
Page 208, Position 2: The Russian word for ‘sock’ is pronounced ‘no sock’.: Boris Unbegaun and Marcus Wheeler (eds) Oxford Russian Dictionary (2007)
Page 208, Position 3: If you say the letters S.O.C.K.S aloud in English, you will find yourself pronouncing the Spanish for ‘it is what it is’ almost perfectly.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/yoursay/weird_words/spanish/correct_socks.shtml
Page 208, Position 4: If you forget the tilde (~) over an N when asking how old someone is in Spanish, you will end up asking them how many anuses they have.: Pamela Goyan Kittler, Marcia Nelms Kathryn P. Sucher, Food and Culture (2011) p. 66.
Page 209, Position 1: When Montenegro became independent from Yugoslavia, its Internet domain name went from being .yu to .me: http://www.bb-online.com/tldinformation/me.shtml
Page 209, Position 2: The Irish word leis (pronounced ‘lesh’) has four different meanings. Bhí leis leis leis leis means ‘His thigh was naked also’.: Sent to us by an Irish speaker, and confirmed independently by another.
Page 209, Position 3: A bourdaloue was a gravy-boat-like receptacle that ladies would squeeze between their thighs if they needed to urinate at court in Georgian England.: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2twwb7c1x3g8b83/
Page 209, Position 4: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all have slime-mold beetles named after them.: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/april05/slime-mold.bush.cheney.ssl.html
Page 210, Position 1: Since 1700, new beetle species have been discovered at the rate of one every six hours.: Sunday Times Magazine, 7 April 2002
Page 210, Position 2: The short-circuit beetle is so named because it eats the lead covering of telephone cables.: http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/ent425/text18/plantpests.html
Page 210, Position 3: Cartwrightia cartwrighti is a scarab beetle described by Oscar L. Cartwright. As you are not supposed to name a species after yourself, he claimed to have named it after his brother.: http://www.curioustaxonomy.net/etym/people.html
Page 210, Position 4: Deathwatch beetles attract mates by repeatedly banging their heads on the floor.: Ken Preston-Mafham and Rod Preston-Mafham, The Encyclopedia of Land Invertebrate Behaviour (1993) p. 64.
Page 211, Position 1: During his first teaching job in 1925, Evelyn Waugh set out to drown himself at sea, but turned back after being stung by a jellyfish.: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/books/review/Kois-t.html?pagewanted=all
Page 211, Position 2: The Irish name for jellyfish is smugairle róin, which literally translates as ‘seal’s snot’.: http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column/nov21_11.htm
Page 211, Position 3: The French for a walkie-talkie is un talkie walkie.: http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/walkie-talkie
Page 211, Position 4: The Eiffel Tower has the same nickname as Margaret Thatcher. It’s known as La Dame de Fer (‘The Iron Lady’).: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower
Page 212, Position 1: Crime, disease and average walking speed increase by 15% as a city doubles in size.: New Scientist, 26 March 2011
Page 212, Position 2: People all over the world are walking 10% faster than they did a decade ago.: http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/urban-striders-shift-into-fast-lane/2007/05/02/1177788225111.html
Page 212, Position 3: Airlines all over the world are flying 10% slower than they did in 1960 (to save on fuel costs).: http://engineering.mit.edu/live/news/188-why-hasnt-commercial-air-travel-gotten-any-faster
Page 212, Position 4: As an apple falls to Earth, the Earth falls very, very slightly towards the apple.: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/56284.html
Page 213, Position 1: Isaac Newton served as MP for Cambridge but spoke in the House only once. He asked for a window to be closed because it was draughty.: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1991687,00.html
Page 213, Position 2: Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, married Oscar Wilde’s first girlfriend.: http://www.neuroticpoets.com/wilde/
Page 213, Position 3: Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, married Trotsky’s secretary.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4306595.stm
Page 213, Position 4: To buy one of everything on Amazon.com would cost just over £9 billion.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6279053.stm (Hardback source)"http://www.neatorama.com/2016/03/02/How-Much-Would-It-Cost-to-Buy-One-of-Everything-on-Amazoncom/ (Paperback source)
Page 214, Position 1: The Slavonic name for God is Bog.: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/71374/bog
Page 214, Position 2: In 1568, the Catholic Church condemned the entire population of the Netherlands to death for heresy.: Norman Davies, Europe: A History (1997) p. 538.
Page 214, Position 3: In the 1930s, the Rev. Frederick Densham of Warleggan in Cornwall alienated his flock by painting the church blue and red, surrounding his rectory with barbed wire and replacing the congregation with cardboard cut-outs.: Karl Shaw, Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics (2004) p. 57.
Page 214, Position 4: Stalin had shamans thrown out of helicopters to give them a chance to prove that they could fly.: Alex Dryden, Death In Siberia (2011)
Page 215, Position 1: It is most likely to be raining at 7 a.m. and least likely at 3 a.m.: Paul J. Marriott, Red Sky at Night, Shepherd's Delight? - Weather Lore of the English Countryside (1981)
Page 215, Position 2: In Maori, the word Maori means ‘normal’.: http://www.maori.info/maori_language.htm
Page 215, Position 3: Princess Anne was the only woman not to be gender-tested at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/02/1028157844426.html?oneclick=true
Page 215, Position 4: Anne, Duc de Montmorency (1493–1567), was a French general and politician. He was named after his mother, Anne Pot.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_de_Montmorency
Page 216, Position 1: Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator responsible for the deaths of 21% of his country’s people, was a former geography teacher.: http://www.history.com/topics/pol-pot
Page 216, Position 2: The Swahili word for a coconut is nazi.: http://www.memrise.com/item/2060585/nazi-coconuts-n-n/
Page 216, Position 3: ‘Mother-in-law’ is an anagram of ‘Hitler woman’.: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/hof.html
Page 216, Position 4: Both Stalin and Hans Christian Anderson were the sons of a cobbler and a washerwoman.: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court Of The Red Tsar (2010)
Page 217, Position 1: In 1187, as a symbol of unity between their two countries, Richard I of England spent a night in the same bed as Philip II of France.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/19/monarchy.france
Page 217, Position 2: In 1381, Richard II made Chelmsford the capital of England for one week.: David Jones, Chelmsford: A History (2003)
Page 217, Position 3: In 1517, Richard Foxe, the blind bishop of Winchester, founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford. On his first visit to the new college, he was led twice round the main quad to make it seem bigger than it really was.: Sir Hugh Casson, Hugh Casson's Oxford (1999)
Page 217, Position 4: In 1953, Keith Richards’ musical career began as a choirboy singing at the Queen’s coronation.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-446771/Keith-Richards-wily-eccentric.html
Page 218, Position 1: No male jaguar has ever successfully mated with a female tiger: if it were to happen, the resulting animal would be known as a ‘jagger’.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera_hybrid
Page 218, Position 2: Early draft names for Walt Disney’s seven dwarfs included Flabby, Dirty, Shifty, Lazy, Burpy, Baldy and Biggo-Ego.: http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/03/47-dwarfs.html
Page 218, Position 3: Strictly speaking, the plural of dwarf is dwarrows.: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000293.html
Page 218, Position 4: In 2011, Toyota announced that the official plural of Prius was Prii.: http://www.autoblog.com/2011/02/21/toyota-says-plural-of-prius-is-prii/
Page 219, Position 1: Research using rabbits has led to 26 Nobel Prizes for Physiology or Medicine.: http://www.fbresearch.org/nobelprize/
Page 219, Position 2: To process their food with maximum efficiency, rabbits swallow up to 80% of their own faeces.: http://www.britishwildlifecentre.co.uk/planyourvisit/animals/rabbit.html
Page 219, Position 3: The Sumatran rabbit is so rare and shy that the nearest humans have no word for it in their language.: http://www.edgeofexistence.org/mammals/species_info.php?id=10/
Page 219, Position 4: Bugs Bunny is not a rabbit but a hare.: Bill Bryson, Icons of England (2010) p. 49.
Page 220, Position 1: The sloth is the only animal named after one of the Seven Deadly Sins. During the rainy season, its metabolism slows down so much that it can starve to death on a full stomach.: http://rainforest.montclair.edu/pwebrf/rainforest/Animals/mammals/sloths.html
Page 220, Position 2: Dolphins shed the top layer of their skin every two hours.: http://scienceblog.com/community/older/2004/4/20043861.shtml"http://discovermagazine.com/2006/feb/physics-swimming/
Page 220, Position 3: Paper can only be recycled six times. After that, the fibres are too weak to hold together.: http://www.napm.org.uk/recycled_paper.htm
Page 220, Position 4: A 2011 study by Nobel Economics laureate Daniel Kahneman of 25 top Wall Street traders found that they were no more consistently successful than a chimpanzee tossing a coin.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers
Page 221, Position 1: A 2011 study in the journal Psychology, Crime and Law tested 39 British senior managers and CEOs and found that they had more psychopathic tendencies than patients in Broadmoor.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers
Page 221, Position 2: Since 1980, the salaries of executives in FTSE 100 companies have risen by 4,000% compared to 300% for their employees.: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/882457-britains-fat-cats-get-the-cream-as-salaries-surge-by-4-000-for-top-execs
Page 221, Position 3: An average pay rise of 50% in 2010 took the annual earnings of the directors of Britain’s FTSE 100 companies to £2.7 million each: over 100 times the national average.: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3b470fd0-385f-11e1-9f07-00144feabdc0.html#axzz27UIFZEn4
Page 221, Position 4: At the end of 2011, the FTSE index stood at 5572: 1358 points lower than it was at the end of 1999.: http://www.forexpros.com/indices/uk-100-historical-data
Page 222, Position 1: Google was originally called Back-Rub.: http://www.google.com/about/company/history/
Page 222, Position 2: The acnestis is the part of the back that is impossible to scratch.: http://wordsmith.org/words/acnestis.html; Just there. No. Right a bit. Ahhhhh.
Page 222, Position 3: The most common treatment for angina is nitroglycerin. It comes in pills, sprays or patches.: http://www.allheartattack.com/treatment/nitro-chest-pain.php
Page 222, Position 4: All Bran is only 87% bran.: John Emsley, Molecules At An Exhibition (1998) p. 49.
Page 223, Position 1: Malo kingi is a jellyfish named after Robert King, an American tourist who died in Australia after being stung by one.: http://www.curioustaxonomy.net/etym/people.html
Page 223, Position 2: The man after whom Parkinson’s disease is named was once arrested for plotting to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart.: http://www.bartsandthelondon.nhs.uk/assets/docs/james_parkinson.pdf
Page 223, Position 3: The man after whom Tourette’s Syndrome is named was shot in the head by one of his patients.: http://mindhacks.com/2010/05/06/gilles-de-la-tourettes-strange-story/
Page 223, Position 4: Spix’s macaw is named after the first man to shoot one.: New Scientist, 26 October 2002
Page 224, Position 1: Until 1857, it was legal for British husbands to sell their wives. The going rate was £3,000 (£223,000 in today’s money).: http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/lqr45&div=34&id=&page=
Page 224, Position 2: The most common reaction from men confronted by TV Licensing Enforcement Officers is, ‘I thought my wife was dealing with it.’: http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information/excuses.jsp
Page 224, Position 3: King Herod’s first wife was called Doris.: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/herodian-women
Page 224, Position 4: Thomas Edison proposed to his second wife in Morse code.: http://www.edisonmuseum.org/content8625.html?pageCatID=2&pageID=2
Page 225, Position 1: The first escalator was for fun, rather than for practical purposes. It was installed at Coney Island in New York and ridden by 75,000 people in its first two weeks.: http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blescalator.htm
Page 225, Position 2: Attendants bearing brandy and smelling salts stood at the top of the first escalator in Harrods, to revive shoppers who became light-headed on the ride.: Inventors and Inventions, Vol. 4 (1 Sep 2007) p. 1259.
Page 225, Position 3: At least one person a week in the UK changes their middle name to ‘Danger’ by deed poll.: http://www.ukdps.co.uk/AddingAMiddleName.html
Page 225, Position 4: If all the British Empire’s dead of the First World War were to march four abreast down Whitehall, it would take them almost four days and nights to pass the Cenotaph.: http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/space-into-place/mapping-the-impact-of-the-great-war/
Page 226, Position 1: At the age of 19, J. S. Bach walked 420 miles to see a performance by the composer Buxtehude.: Darren Henley and Tim Lihoreau, Classic Ephemera (2009)
Page 226, Position 2: To chork is to make a noise like feet walking in waterlogged shoes.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 226, Position 3: J’ai des rossignols (‘I’ve got nightingales’) is French for unexplained noises coming from a car.: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.forum-auto.com/sqlforum/section4/sujet39287.htm&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%2522J%2527ai%2Bdes%2Brossignols%2522%2B%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D
Page 226, Position 4: 250,000 birds were killed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. About the same number die from crashing into window glass in the US every day.: Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) p. 192.
Page 227, Position 1: Only half the passengers and crew who reached America on the Mayflower in November 1620 survived until the following spring.: http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/colonial_life/first_colonists.htm
Page 227, Position 2: Two-thirds of the world’s caviar is eaten aboard the QE2.: S. Boeckmann and N. Rebeiz-Nielson, Caviar: The Definitive Guide (1999)
Page 227, Position 3: There are 35,112 golf courses in the world, half of them in the USA.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf
Page 227, Position 4: All the world’s golf courses put together cover more land area than the Bahamas.: http://bayeres.ca/resources/bayeres//Newsletters/OntheGreen_Jul2007.pdf"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area
Page 228, Position 1: The land around the Iron Curtain lay untouched for decades. In 1989, it was turned into a nature reserve 1,400 kilometres long, but less than 200 metres wide.: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/from-iron-curtain-to-green-belt-how-new-life-came-to-the-death-strip-1686294.html
Page 228, Position 2: Victorian guidebooks advised women to put pins in their mouths to avoid being kissed in the dark when trains went through tunnels.: Karen Farrington, Great Victorian Railway Journeys (2012)
Page 228, Position 3: Beekeeping is illegal under the New York City Health Code, because bees are ‘naturally inclined to do harm’.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/science/earth/15bees.html
Page 228, Position 4: Herring talk out of their arses, communicating by firing bubbles from their backsides that sound like high-pitched raspberries.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4343-fish-farting-may-not-just-be-hot-air.html
Page 229, Position 1: The filament of the first commercial light bulb, patented by Thomas Edison in 1880, was made of bamboo.: http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bllight2.htm"http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/ecocenter/greener-living/bamboo.html
Page 229, Position 2: The tall chef’s hat or toque blanche traditionally had a hundred pleats to represent the number of ways an egg could be cooked.: http://www.younggourmet.com/a/32.html
Page 229, Position 3: It was once suggested that New York should be called Brimaquonx, combining the names of all the city’s boroughs – Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, Queens and Bronx – into one.: http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/brimaquonx/
Page 229, Position 4: Tibet has a smaller GDP than Malta, but is 4,000 times its size.: http://www.economist.com/content/all_parities_china
Page 230, Position 1: Hamesucken is the crime of assaulting someone in their own home.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 230, Position 2: Hapax legomenon describes a word or phrase that has only been used once.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 230, Position 3: Haptodysphoria is the feeling you get from running your nails down a blackboard.: http://www.medilexicon.com/medicaldictionary.php?t=39245
Page 230, Position 4: Hydrophobophobia is the fear of hydrophobia.: http://www.encyclo.co.uk/define/hydrophobophobia
Page 231, Position 1: Women buy 85% of the world’s Valentine cards and 96% of all the candles in America.: http://www.candlecomfort.com/historyofcandles.html
Page 231, Position 2: Einstein gave his $32,000 Nobel Prize money to his first wife, Mileva, as part of their divorce settlement.: Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain (2001)
Page 231, Position 3: The best-selling work of fiction of the 15th century was The Tale of the Two Lovers, an erotic novel by the man who later became Pope Pius II.: http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/piccolomini/hist_e.html
Page 231, Position 4: Tiramisu means ‘pick me up’ in Italian.: http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/news/news-detail/index.aspx?nid=1558
Page 232, Position 1: The names of the English rivers Amber, Avon, Axe, Esk, Exe, Ouse, Humber, Irwell, Thames and Tyne all mean ‘river’ or ‘water’ in various ancient languages.: http://archive.org/stream/placenamesofengl00john/placenamesofengl00john_djvu.txt
Page 232, Position 2: There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.: http://www.saudiembassy.net/about/country-information/agriculture_water/Water_Resources.aspx
Page 232, Position 3: The Onyx River is the only river in Antarctica. It flows for just 60 days a year in high summer.: http://www.antarcticimages.com/Antarctica/Landscapes-and-Scenery/5365822_fHKwfB/3/328455886_Dfi9p#!i=328455886&k=Dfi9p
Page 232, Position 4: The river with the largest discharge volume in Albania is the Seman. About 100 miles north of the Seman is the small town of Puke.: http://albania.shqiperia.com/kat/m/shfaqart/aid/2225/Albanian-Rivers.html
Page 233, Position 1: The gold medals at London 2012 were the largest and heaviest ever awarded at a Summer Olympics, but are only 1.34% gold.: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/09/living/olympians-bite-medals/index.html
Page 233, Position 2: In 1979, the Uruguayan footballer Daniel Allende transferred from Central Español to Rentistas for a fee of 550 beefsteaks, to be paid in instalments of 25 steaks a week.: William Fotheringham, Fotheringham's Sporting Pastimes (2007) p. 57.
Page 233, Position 3: In 1937, Gillingham FC sold one of their players to Aston Villa for three second-hand turnstiles, two goalkeepers’ sweaters, three cans of weed-killer and an old typewriter.: William Fotheringham, Fotheringham's Sporting Pastimes (2007) p. 59.
Page 233, Position 4: Typewriters used to be known as ‘literary pianos’.: http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/ColumnsOthers/RIP-The-literary-piano/Article1-691432.aspx
Page 234, Position 1: The raw materials needed to make a desktop computer, including 530lb of fossil fuels, 50lb of chemicals and 3,330lb of water, weigh two tons: about the same as a rhinoceros.: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1168848,00.html
Page 234, Position 2: Exocet is French for ‘flying fish’.: http://www.historynet.com/exocet-antiship-missile-the-flying-fish-that-flummoxes-radar.htm
Page 234, Position 3: Ancient Scandinavians believed that the Aurora Borealis was the result of huge shoals of herring reflecting light into the sky.: http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/auroras-heavenly-lights/
Page 234, Position 4: The word ‘döner’ in döner kebab is Turkish for ‘rotating’.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7841890.stm
Page 235, Position 1: Woodrow Wilson kept a flock of sheep on the White House lawn. He sold the wool and gave the money to the Red Cross.: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/white-house-pets
Page 235, Position 2: Bill Clinton was mauled by a sheep at the age of eight and didn’t learn to ride a bicycle till he was 22.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/presidents/bill-clinton-the-great-seducer-1482925.html
Page 235, Position 3: Before signing the trade embargo against Cuba, John F. Kennedy got his press secretary to buy him 1,000 Cuban cigars.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2098064/John-F-Kennedy-bought-1-200-Cuban-cigars-hours-ordered-US-trade-embargo.html
Page 235, Position 4: Ronald Reagan’s pet name for Nancy Reagan was ‘Mommy Poo Pants’.: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,91812,00.html
Page 236, Position 1: After George W. Bush was re-elected president in 2004, the number of calls from US citizens to the Canadian Immigration authorities jumped from 20,000 to 115,000 a day.: http://ezinearticles.com/?Americas-Future-Civil-War&id=595689
Page 236, Position 2: One of the main contributors to the original Oxford English Dictionary cut off his penis in a fit of madness.: Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (2004) p. 197.
Page 236, Position 3: The longest palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘tattarrattat’. James Joyce used it in Ulysses: ‘I knew his tattarrattat at the door.’: Donald McFarlan and Norris McWhirter, Guinness Book of World Records (1991) p. 366.
Page 236, Position 4: The longest palindrome written by one poet about another is W. H. Auden’s: ‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.’: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/paldrome.htm
Page 237, Position 1: James Joyce married a woman called Nora Barnacle. She once said to him, ‘Why don’t you write books people can read?’: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/quotes.html
Page 237, Position 2: During rehearsals for Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie ordered Brussels sprouts every day for lunch, but never ate them. When asked why, he said: ‘I cannot resist ordering them. The words are so lovely to say.’: http://amsaw.org/amsaw-ithappenedinhistory-050905-barrie.html
Page 237, Position 3: Botanists cannot tell the difference between broccoli and cauliflower.: http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/agriculture/horticulture/vegetables/vegetables-a-z/broccoli
Page 237, Position 4: Rhubarb is a vegetable.: http://bites.today.com/_news/2011/05/23/6702102-whats-that-vegetable-the-radiant-rhubarb?lite
Page 238, Position 1: Some species of scorpion survive on one meal a year.: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/bugs/scorpion/
Page 238, Position 2: The Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul has only 5% of the country’s population but provides 70% of its fashion models.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/americas/08models.html
Page 238, Position 3: The trap-jaw ant has the fastest bite in the world: its jaws close 2,300 times faster than a blink of an eye.: http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/08/21_ant.shtml
Page 238, Position 4: Winston Churchill is the only politician to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/
Page 239, Position 1: In Bolivia, the Quechua word for ‘baby’ is guagua – pronounced ‘wah wah’.: Erin Foley and Leslie Jermyn, Ecuador (2005) p. 87.
Page 239, Position 2: A baby echidna is called a ‘puggle’.: http://www.perthzoo.wa.gov.au/echidna-breeding-success-6673/
Page 239, Position 3: Baby puffins are called ‘pufflings’.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-18827974
Page 239, Position 4: Baby hedgehogs are called ‘hoglets’.: http://www.britishhedgehogs.org.uk/FAQS/caring_for_hoglets.htm
Page 240, Position 1: In 19th-century Britain, ‘mock-turtle’ soup was often made from cow foetuses.: Bee Wilson, Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee: The Dark History of the Food Cheats (2008)
Page 240, Position 2: Dogs can smell where electric current has been and human fingerprints that are a week old.: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-491464/Everything-wanted-know--much--cats-dogs.html
Page 240, Position 3: Lord Byron’s mail often contained locks of hair from adoring female fans. Some of the clippings he sent them in return actually came from his pet Newfoundland dog, Boatswain.: Sunday Times, 22 June 2008
Page 240, Position 4: As soon as Lord Byron left England for the last time in 1816, his creditors entered his home and repossessed everything he owned, right down to his tame squirrel.: Catherine M. Andronik, Wildly Romantic (2007)
Page 241, Position 1: In 1899, Dr Horace Emmett announced that the secret of eternal youth was injections of ground-up squirrel testicles. He died later the same year.: William Donaldson, Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics (2004) p. 249.
Page 241, Position 2: Squirrels can remember the hiding places of up to 10,000 nuts.: http://windstar.org/animals/squirrels-are-the-most-fed-and-observed-animals/
Page 241, Position 3: More than 10,000 seashells had to be crushed to make the purple dye to colour a single Roman toga.: http://www.roman-colosseum.info/roman-clothing/colors-of-roman-clothing.htm
Page 241, Position 4: The Latin verb manicare means ‘to come in the morning’.: P. G. W. Glare (ed) Oxford Latin Dictionary
Page 242, Position 1: In the novel that the film Pinocchio was based on, Jiminy Cricket was brutally murdered and Pinocchio had his feet burned off and was hanged by villagers.: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/10/carlo_collodi_s_pinocchio_why_is_the_original_pinocchio_subjecte.html
Page 242, Position 2: Donald Duck’s voice started out as an attempt to do an impression of a lamb.: Malcolm Tait. The Birdwatcher's Companion (2005) p. 10.
Page 242, Position 3: Taurine, the active ingredient in Red Bull, is also present in bile, breast milk and spiders.: http://energydrink.redbull.com/taurine"http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070824220328.htm"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18242615
Page 242, Position 4: Sitting Bull was originally called Jumping Badger.: http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3771.html
Page 243, Position 1: When Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, he ordered all Monopoly sets to be destroyed.: http://www.hasbro.com
Page 243, Position 2: The human body grows fastest during its few first weeks in the womb. If it were to keep growing at the same rate for 50 years, it would be bigger than Mount Everest.: E. Gordon Dickie, Fetal Iq and Beyond (2006) p. 12."And even this is an underestimate.
Page 243, Position 3: To produce beef takes 16,000 times its own weight in water.: http://www.ifad.org/english/water/key.htm
Page 243, Position 4: The Turkish for ‘cannibal’ is yamyam.: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yamyam
Page 244, Position 1: On 30th June 1998, England lost to Argentina in a World Cup penalty shoot-out. On that day, and for two days afterwards, the number of heart attacks in England increased by 25%.: http://www.bmj.com/content/325/7378/1439.abstract
Page 244, Position 2: The first violence of the French Revolution took place at a luxury wallpaper factory.: http://timerime.com/en/event/499225/Rveillion+Riots/
Page 244, Position 3: In 1811, crimes punishable by death in Britain included sheep stealing, impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner, ‘strong evidence of malice’ in children aged 7–14, living with gypsies for a month and stealing cheese.: http://www.edge.org/conversation.php?cid=mc2011-history-violence-pinker
Page 244, Position 4: In 2011, cheese was the most stolen food in the world.: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/22/cheese-most-stolen-food_n_1024309.html
Page 245, Position 1: Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was Moon.: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/magazine/21fob-q4-t.html
Page 245, Position 2: Fritinancy is the buzzing of insects.: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-fri2.htm
Page 245, Position 3: Most bees buzz in the key of A, unless they are tired, when they buzz in the key of E.: http://www.blackburnbeekeepers.com/Beetalk%20Sept%202003.pdf
Page 245, Position 4: British moths include the Uncertain, the Confused, the Magpie, the Lackey, the Drinker, the Streak, the Ruddy Highflyer, the Buff Arches, the Figure of Eighty, the Anomalous, the Dark Dagger, the Lettuce Shark, the Isabelline Tiger, the Waved Tabby and the Mother Shipton.: http://www.ukmoths.org.uk
Page 246, Position 1: The cake for the Queen Mother’s wedding in 1923 weighed half a ton.: Kate Williams, Young Elizabeth: The Making of our Queen (2012)
Page 246, Position 2: The three most searched-for individuals in the Nobel Peace Prize nomination database are Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.: http://nobelprize.org/
Page 246, Position 3: A corpocracy is a society ruled by corporations; a coprocracy is one ruled by shits.: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/corpocracy
Page 246, Position 4: The first mobile phones cost £2,000 each and had a battery life of about 20 minutes.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4138449.stm
Page 247, Position 1: The world’s first weather map, published in The Times on 1st April 1875, gave the weather for the previous day.: http://www.galton.org
Page 247, Position 2: During the First World War, explosions from the battle of the Somme could be heard on Hampstead Heath.: Martin Gilbert, Somme: The Heroism and Horror of War (2006) p. 34.
Page 247, Position 3: Handschuhschneeballwerfer is German slang for ‘coward’. It means someone who wears gloves to throw snowballs.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4294160.stm
Page 247, Position 4: Two French kings were killed by tennis: King Louis X (1289–1316) caught a fatal chill after one game and Charles VIII (1470–98) never recovered from a coma after another one. He had banged his head on the door lintel on the way into the match.: http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/Features/History_of_Tennis.shtml
Page 248, Position 1: Humans kill at least 100 million sharks a year, or about 11,000 an hour.: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/adventure/2012/08/shark-week-proves-we-are-fascinated-by-sharks-so-why-do-we-kill-so-many-of-them/
Page 248, Position 2: Female aphids give birth to other live female aphids that are already pregnant with yet more female aphids.: http://web.extension.illinois.edu/lmw/news/news27868.html
Page 248, Position 3: A flock of snipe is known as a ‘wisp’.: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/550475/snipe
Page 248, Position 4: The bee hummingbird is the world’s smallest bird. It weighs about as much as a tea bag.: http://www.arkive.org/bee-hummingbird/mellisuga-helenae/#text=Facts
Page 249, Position 1: John Ainsworth Horrocks (1818–46), who introduced camels to Australia, was also accidentally shot by one. He died of gangrene a month later, but had the camel executed first.: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/horrocks-john-ainsworth-12989
Page 249, Position 2: The Czech general Jan Zizka ordered his skin to be turned into a war drum after his death. It was beaten at times of national emergency, such as the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618.: James Whitehead, Joiner (1971) p. 286.
Page 249, Position 3: George Kakoma, the composer of Uganda’s national anthem, sued his government for lost royalties in 1962. He won the case and was paid 2,000 Ugandan shillings, equivalent to 50p.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19063605
Page 249, Position 4: A ‘jackstraw’ is a 16th-century word for a person of no substance or worth.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 250, Position 1: A boar produces 200ml of semen each time it ejaculates, compared to a man’s 3ml.: Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2009)
Page 250, Position 2: King George III’s urine was blue.: http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2008Mar/GeorgeIIIindigoBlueRingTest.asp
Page 250, Position 3: The most times a person has been stung by bees without dying is 2,443.: http://ezinearticles.com/?Extreme-Pest-Problems-Across-the-World&id=6403281
Page 250, Position 4: A ‘conscientious objector’ was originally one who refused to have their children inoculated.: Trevor Norton, Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth (2011) p. 346.
Page 251, Position 1: Skiing was introduced to Switzerland by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1893.: http://www.siracd.com/life.shtml
Page 251, Position 2: Nelson Mandela was not removed from the US terror watch list until 2008.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7484517.stm
Page 251, Position 3: The polar explorers Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton both explored in Burberry.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/south_approaches_01.shtml
Page 251, Position 4: Two-thirds of the world’s population has never seen snow.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2008/aug/21/therumourmill.transfergossip
Page 252, Position 1: The French for candyfloss is barbe à papa (dad’s beard).: http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/barbe-%C3%A0-papa
Page 252, Position 2: The Hebrew for candyfloss is searot savta (grandma’s hair).: http://www.purefun.ca/products_cottonCandy.html
Page 252, Position 3: The Afrikaans for candyfloss is spookasem (ghost breath).: http://translate.google.com/#en/af/candyfloss"http://translate.google.com/#af/en/spook%20asem
Page 252, Position 4: Moer-my gesig is Afrikaans for ‘a face you want to punch’.: n.b. some of the insults listed on this site are not safe for younger eyes.; http://www.myinsults.com/all-insults/afrikaans-insults
Page 253, Position 1: Before he became prime minister of Australia in 1983, Bob Hawke got into the 1955 Guinness Book of Records for drinking two and a half pints of beer in 11 seconds.: Bob Hawke, Hawke Memoirs (1994) p. 28.
Page 253, Position 2: 11 of the 12 men to have walked on the Moon were in the Boy Scouts.: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/asm/ab_0051-0100/acr_94_bill_20120130_introduced.html
Page 253, Position 3: In 1937, comic acrobat Joseph Späh survived the Hindenburg airship disaster by jumping out of the window.: R. Conrad Stein, The Hindenburg Disaster (1993) p. 20.
Page 253, Position 4: The French for ‘window-shopping’ is faire du leche-vitrines or ‘window-licking’.: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/l%C3%A8che-vitrine
Page 254, Position 1: France has 36,782 mayors, five of whom are mayors of villages that ceased to exist 92 years ago.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/why-the-only-english-mayor-in-france-is-worried-about-losing-his-kingdom-789358.html
Page 254, Position 2: In 1992, the rules governing what the French may legally christen their children were relaxed. The following year, the most popular name for baby boys was ‘Kevin’.: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118247444843644288.html"http://www.babynamefacts.com/popularnames/countries.php?country=FRN&year=1992
Page 254, Position 3: The French philosopher Voltaire’s explanation for why the fossils of seashells are found on mountaintops was that they had been left there by ancient picnickers with a taste for seafood.: Louis Dupre, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004) p. 37.
Page 254, Position 4: The French mathematician Descartes had a theory that monkeys and apes were able to talk – but kept quiet in case they were asked to do any work.: Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (2006) p. 309.
Page 255, Position 1: Work is three times more dangerous than war.: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=14106&Cr=work&Cr1=safety#.UGMmU1H3AwQ"http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/446476--death-tolls-during-wars-inaccurate-study-says
Page 255, Position 2: A single human male produces enough sperm in a fortnight to impregnate every fertile woman on the planet.: C. Roland Cook, Sex, Sin and Science: What Evolution Says about Religion and Desire (2009) p. 29.
Page 255, Position 3: None of the best-known English swear words are of Anglo-Saxon origin.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/routesofenglish/storysofar/programme2_4.shtml
Page 255, Position 4: Under the provisions of the 1912 Scottish Protection of Animals Act, the Loch Ness monster is a protected species.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/988566.stm
Page 256, Position 1: Before they were famous, Clive James and Sylvester Stallone had jobs cleaning out lion cages.: Rolf Harris, Mark Leigh and Mark Lepine, Tall Animal Tales: Amazing True Stories From The Star of TV's Animal Hospital (2001) p. 3.
Page 256, Position 2: Eric Clapton and Jack Nicholson grew up believing their grandmothers were their mothers and their mothers were their sisters.: http://web.archive.org/web/20081021095326/"http://www.jacknicholson.org/1984RollingStone.html"http://www.ericclapton.com/eric-clapton-biography
Page 256, Position 3: Olivia Newton-John was president of the Isle of Man Basking Shark Society.: http://www.gov.im/infocentre/archived_releases/PR_dot_01/dot_17-08-01.html
Page 256, Position 4: JohnCleese,MichaelCaineandMarcBolan all bought Rolls-Royces before they could drive.: Mike Fox and Steve Smith, Rolls-Royce The Complete Works (1984)
Page 257, Position 1: The last words of Henry Royce, co-founder of Rolls-Royce, were: ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office.’: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c7493e56-5a67-11dd-bf96-000077b07658.html
Page 257, Position 2: When The Office first aired in 2001, it had the second-lowest audience appreciation score on the BBC after women’s bowling.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4152361.stm
Page 257, Position 3: When Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour began in 1946, it had a male host. Early items included ‘Cooking with Whale Meat’ and ‘I Married a Lion-tamer’.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5399146.stm
Page 257, Position 4: ‘Broadcasting’ comes from farming – it originally meant scattering seeds across a field.: http://www.etymonline.com
Page 258, Position 1: Scolding and eavesdropping were illegal in England until 1967.: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/58
Page 258, Position 2: Abortion was illegal in the UK for only 164 years, between 1803 and 1967.: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10179
Page 258, Position 3: To avoid being caught breaking the law by a speed camera, you would have to be travelling at 28,000 miles per hour.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,,-2567,00.html
Page 258, Position 4: In 1999, a gang of thieves was forced to do community service along a road in Rotherham. The next spring the daffodils coming into bloom spelt out the words ‘shag’ and ‘bollocks’.: http://www.donny.co.uk/Doncaster/news/index.php3?ID=378
Page 259, Position 1: A williwaw is a sudden gust of wind coming off a high plateau.: http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/wind/The-Williwaw.htm
Page 259, Position 2: Mollynogging is an old Lincolnshire word for hanging out with loose women.: Jeffrey Kacirk, The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten (2000) p. 123.
Page 259, Position 3: Areodjarekput is an Inuit word meaning ‘to exchange wives for a few days only’.: Nigel Lewis, The Book of Babel: Words And The Way We See Things (1994) p. 301.
Page 259, Position 4: A special bastard is someone born out of wedlock whose parents later married.: Henry Campbell Black, A Law Dictionary (1995) p. 122.
Page 260, Position 1: Although they didn’t meet until they were teenagers, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were born in the same year and delivered by the same midwife.: http://www.neonatology.org/pdf/midwifery.history.pdf
Page 260, Position 2: The average human being gets through 900 skins in a lifetime.: Dennis D. Hunt, Are We There Yet?: A Guide to Life, Living and Death (2007) p. 261.
Page 260, Position 3: The air in an average-sized room weighs about 100 pounds.: http://www.challengers101.com/Pressure.html
Page 260, Position 4: The US navy has more aircraft carriers than all the other navies of the world combined.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_service
Page 261, Position 1: An animal the size of an elephant could evolve to an animal the size of a sheep in 100,000 generations, but for an animal the size of a sheep to evolve to the size of an elephant would take 1.6 million generations.: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120203-mammals-evolution-body-size-science-elephants-mice/
Page 261, Position 2: After a meal, a Burmese python’s heart grows by 40%.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383835/
Page 261, Position 3: Squid travel faster when they jump through the air than they do under water.: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=squid-can-fly-save-energy
Page 261, Position 4: Lava can flow as fast as a sprinting greyhound.: http://articles.cnn.com/2002-01-19/world/congo.volcano.0715_1_lava-nyiragongo-volcanologist/2?_s=PM:WORLD
Page 262, Position 1: If melted down for scrap, a bronze medal from London 2012 would be worth less than £3.: http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/londonspy/why-gold-not-gold-bronze-worth-less-petrol-111832435.html
Page 262, Position 2: In 2008, archaeologists in Cyprus found a 7th-century curse inscribed on a lead tablet that said, ‘May your penis hurt when you make love.’ Nobody knows who made the curse, or why.: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gs7KYHLwaf0TeF4bnNkYp1xS6ZvQ
Page 262, Position 3: The Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century treatise on witchcraft, warned that witches stole men’s penises and kept them in birds’ nests.: Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2009)
Page 262, Position 4: The average person in the UK talks about the weather 44 times a month to 18 other people.: According to a study commissioned by The Weather Channel; http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/uk/weather-is-one-of-the-biggest-talking-points-in-the-uk-16167910.html
Page 263, Position 1: The average Briton suffers from 9,672 minor injuries over the course of a 78-year lifespan.: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/05/infographic-the-average-person-gets-9-672-minor-injuries-in-a-lifetime/257777/
Page 263, Position 2: The National Health Service is the world’s 4th-largest employer after the US Defense Department, the Chinese Red Army and Walmart.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17429786
Page 263, Position 3: The NHS has halved superbug deaths and saved 10,000 lives in the last four years simply by getting doctors and nurses to wash their hands.: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/hygiene-drive-leads-to-health-miracle-7712392.html
Page 263, Position 4: If everyone in the world washed their hands properly, a million lives could be saved a year.: http://www.hygienecentral.org.uk/pdf/talking%20dirty.pdf
Page 264, Position 1: Mundungus n. The stench of tobacco.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 264, Position 2: Quaquaversal adj. Going off in all directions.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 264, Position 3: Pixilated adj. Slightly mad or confused, having been led astray by pixies.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 264, Position 4: Rasceta n. The creases on the inside of the wrist.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 265, Position 1: The first commercial chewing gum appeared in 1871, after Thomas Adams had failed to make car tyres from the same ingredients.: http://www.gummybin.com/Sticky_Facts.aspx
Page 265, Position 2: The first chewing gum made by William Wrigley Jr (in 1892) was given away free with his baking powder.: http://www.wrigley.com/global/about-us/heritage-timeline.aspx
Page 265, Position 3: Lilt, the soft drink with the ‘totally tropical taste’, is completely unknown in the Caribbean.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/2723425/Ad-of-the-Week-Lilts-Caribbean-attitude.html
Page 265, Position 4: Before the Queen puts her shoes on, a member of the royal household wears them first to make sure they are comfortable.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/queen-elizabeth-II/9278018/Queen-employs-Royal-shoe-wearer-to-soften-up-new-leather.html
Page 266, Position 1: Spiders are extremely carnivorous. 10,000 spiders sealed in a room will eventually result in one enormously fat spider.: The Times, 9 April 2001
Page 266, Position 2: Americans eat 500 million pounds of peanut butter a year, enough to coat the floor of the Grand Canyon.: http://www.alpeanuts.com/consumer/peanuts-did-you-know.html
Page 266, Position 3: Every month in the Netherlands, 133 billion insects are killed colliding into cars.: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/12/us-dutch-insects-idUSTRE76B4YK20110712
Page 266, Position 4: Once a year, on 15th August, Prince Hans-Adam II, the ruler of Liechtenstein, invites the whole country to a party at his house.: http://media.lonelyplanet.com/shop/pdfs/western-europe-10-liechten-lux-preview.pdf
Page 267, Position 1: In online dating sites you are more likely to come across a teacher or lecturer than someone from any other profession.: Daily Record, 6 May 1998
Page 267, Position 2: Since 1959, it has been legal to marry a dead person in France, providing you can prove the wedding was already planned.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/17/french-woman-marries-dead-partner
Page 267, Position 3: Warmduscher is German for ‘wimp’: a person so pathetic he only takes hot showers.: Nick Mamatas, Insults Every Man Should Know (2011)
Page 267, Position 4: A survey of a working-class area of London in 1915 found only 12 houses with baths. Nine of them were being used for storage.: BBC History Magazine, February 2008
Page 268, Position 1: One third of patent applications in America in 1905 were related in some way to the bicycle.: http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/bicycle-tech/bicycle-tech.php?cts=instrumentation
Page 268, Position 2: Every year, a thousand letters arrive in Jerusalem addressed to God.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/20/israel-jerusalem-letters-to-god
Page 268, Position 3: In 2009, a retired policeman called Geraint Woolford was admitted to Abergele Hospital in north Wales and ended up next to another retired policeman called Geraint Woolford. The men weren’t related, had never met and were the only two people in the UK called Geraint Woolford.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6762605/Two-retired-policeman-with-same-name-ended-up-side-by-side-in-hospital.html
Page 268, Position 4: There is no word in English which rhymes with ‘pint’.: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-rhyme-for-pint-and-other-burning-issues-of-the-day-1182560.html
Page 269, Position 1: There are two rhymes in English for purple: curple, a strap passing under a horse’s tail, and hirple, to walk along dragging one leg behind the other.: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Rhyming+the+unrhymeable-a0182524334
Page 269, Position 2: The African giant pouched rat can smell tuberculosis 50 times faster than a laboratory scientist can identify it.: http://www.news-medical.net/news/20110907/African-giant-pouched-rat-may-be-more-effective-than-humans-at-detecting-TB.aspx
Page 269, Position 3: Electrons move along an electricity cable about as fast as honey flows.: http://www.physics-tutorial.net/EM2-electric-current.html
Page 269, Position 4: 80% of people who die from anorexia are aged at least 45.: http://www.mentalhealth.com/mag1/p5m-et01.html
Page 270, Position 1: A red blood cell can make a complete circuit of your body in 20 seconds.: New Scientist, Volume 183, Issue 2463
Page 270, Position 2: If your stomach acid got on to your skin it would burn a hole in it.: Michelle Cook, The Brain Wash (2007)
Page 270, Position 3: A pumping human heart can squirt blood a distance of 30 feet.: Sarah Levete, Understanding the Heart, Lungs, and Blood (2010) p. 40.
Page 270, Position 4: When we blush, our stomach lining goes red too.: http://www.healthywaymagazine.com/issue32/06_skin_conditions.html
Page 271, Position 1: Christopher Columbus suffered from arthritis in his wrist as a result of a bacterial infection caught from a parrot.: Philip A. Mackowiak, Post Mortem: Solving History's Great Medical Mysteries (2007) p. 163.
Page 271, Position 2: John Wayne once won Lassie the Dog in a game of poker.: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1982&dat=19721007&id=4adGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1DMNAAAAIBAJ&pg=5005,1230333
Page 271, Position 3: The founder of match.com, Gary Kremen, lost his girlfriend to a man she met on match.com.: http://theweek.com/article/index/217826/the-financial-times-matchcom-profile-5-takeaways
Page 271, Position 4: At Ronnie Barker’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey in 2006, four candles were carried instead of the usual two.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1512057/2000-of-Ronnie-Barkers-pals-get-the-joke.html
Page 272, Position 1: Despite playing the Fonz for ten years in the sitcom Happy Days, Henry Winkler never learned to ride a motorcycle.: http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/henry-winkler
Page 272, Position 2: The maize needed to fill a single Range Rover’s petrol tank with biofuel would feed a person for a whole year.: Ecologist Magazine, April 2008
Page 272, Position 3: J. R. R. Tolkien typed the 1,200-page manuscript of The Lord of the Rings trilogy with two fingers.: http://www.nytimes.com/1967/01/15/books/tolkien-interview.html
Page 272, Position 4: Quantophrenia is an obsessive reliance on statistics.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 273, Position 1: The first published crossword was called a word-cross.: Mark Diehl and Kevin McCann, The 21st Century Crossword Puzzle Dictionary (2009) p. 7.
Page 273, Position 2: The hand jive was invented at the Cat’s Whiskers club in Soho. The premises were so small and cramped that there was only enough room for people to dance with their hands.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jan/08/best-shot-photography
Page 273, Position 3: Feeding curry to a sheep reduces the amount of methane in its farts by up to 40%.: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/curry-spices-for-cows-and-sheep-could-cut-methane-emissions-2029761.html
Page 273, Position 4: More than half the trash collected on the summit of Ben Nevis is banana peel.: http://www.jmt.org/news.asp?nid=JMT-N10412&s=2
Page 274, Position 1: You could listen to a radio on the Moon but it’s virtually impossible aboard a submarine. Radio waves travel much more easily through space than through water.: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen06/gen06162.htm
Page 274, Position 2: Areas of the Moon include the Ocean of Storms, the Marsh of Decay and the Lake of Death.: Patrick Moore, The Amateur Astronomer (1990) p. 211.
Page 274, Position 3: By law, buskers in Dublin must have a repertoire of at least 20 songs.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-19111983
Page 274, Position 4: The opposite of plankton is nekton – creatures that move through water at will, rather than merely drifting. Fish, dolphins and humans are nekton.: http://www.nhptv.org/natureworks/nwep6e.htm
Page 275, Position 1: When John Hetherington ventured out in public wearing the first top hat, it was considered so shocking that children screamed, women fainted and a small boy broke his arm in the chaos.: Charles George Harper, A Londoner's Own London (1927) p. 211.
Page 275, Position 2: In October 2008, inflation in Zimbabwe reached 231,000,000%.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/09/zimbabwe
Page 275, Position 3: The average car in Britain is parked for 96% of the time.: http://www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk/blog/index.php/2012/07/17/seven-million-uk-lawns-lost-to-park-cars/
Page 275, Position 4: Casanova was a librarian.: http://www.amazon.com/Casanova-Was-Librarian-Light-Hearted-Profession/dp/078642981X
Page 276, Position 1: India has almost 155,000 post offices: more than any country in the world and almost twice as many as China.: http://www.indiaonline.in/About/utilities/index.html
Page 276, Position 2: Chess, Ludo and Snakes and Ladders were all invented in ancient India. Snakes and Ladders was called Moksha Patam – ‘the path to liberation’.: Andrew Topsfield, The Art of Play: Board and Card Games in India (2006)
Page 276, Position 3: South-east England has a lower annual rainfall than Jerusalem or Beirut.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/11/deluge-drought-gardening-dan-pearson
Page 276, Position 4: 50 to 100 people kill themselves on the London Underground each year, but official records state that only three babies have ever been born there, in 1924, 2008 and 2009.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8072294.st
Page 277, Position 1: Women make 25% of the films in Iran, compared to 4% in the US.: http://www2.irib.ir/worldservice/englishradio/IRAN/iranart.htm
Page 277, Position 2: By 2025, there will be more English speakers in China than in the rest of the world put together: http://www.ccaps.net/blog/china-bans-english/
Page 277, Position 3: A new skyscraper is built in China every five days. By 2016, there will be four times as many as in the whole of the US.: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2012-07/17/content_15588554.htm
Page 277, Position 4: The electrical energy that powers each cell in our bodies works out at 30 million volts per metre, the equivalent voltage of a bolt of lightning.: http://www.bmb.leeds.ac.uk/illingworth/6form/index.htm
Page 278, Position 1: The Netherlands exports more soy sauce than Japan.: http://www.foxtranslate.com/culture/hsbc-airport-ads-share-remarkable-insight-to-our-world
Page 278, Position 2: Tokyo has three times as many Michelin-starred restaurants as Paris.: http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2009/11/20/michelin-tokyo-guide-turns-to-local-inspectors-tops-paris-for-three-star-awards/
Page 278, Position 3: Bricklehampton is the longest place name in the UK with no repeated letters.: Country Fair, Vol. 31 (1966) p. 91.
Page 278, Position 4: A vulture can safely swallow enough botulinum toxin to kill 300,000 guinea pigs.: John Madson, Stories from Under the Sky (2012) p. 102.
Page 279, Position 1: More than seven times as many people in the UK visit museums and galleries every year as attend Premier League football games.: http://www.nationalmuseums.org.uk/media/documents/publications/manifesto_for_museums.pdf
Page 279, Position 2: Manchester United is the most hated brand in Britain and the 7th most hated in the world.: http://www.metro.co.uk/sport/oddballs/859274-man-united-voted-most-hated-company-in-britain
Page 279, Position 3: Angola has the world’s best record at football penalty shoot-outs. They have never lost one.: http://www.penaltyshootouts.co.uk/countries.html
Page 279, Position 4: Ants nod to each other as they pass.: New Scientist, 21 July 2012
Page 280, Position 1: The Swiss own more guns per head than the Iraqis.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/25/gun-ownership-us-data
Page 280, Position 2: Saudi women have won the right to vote, but not the right to drive to the polling station.: http://www.npr.org/2011/09/29/140920759/saudi-women-can-vote-but-still-not-drive
Page 280, Position 3: In Norway, ‘Odd’ and ‘Even’ are common male first names. You can even (oddly) have ‘Odd-Even’.: http://naylors-in-norway.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/odd-and-even.html
Page 280, Position 4: Richard the Lionheart’s younger brother, John, was nicknamed ‘Dollheart’.: http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/summer00/Mailbag/mailbag_2.html
Page 281, Position 1: A smellsmock is a priest who indulges in extra-curricular activities with his flock.: Robert Hendrickson, QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins"(1998) p. 622.
Page 281, Position 2: Japanese sheep go ‘meh’.: http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/animal.html
Page 281, Position 3: Gymnophoria is the sense that someone is mentally undressing you.: http://www.encyclo.co.uk/define/gymnophoria
Page 281, Position 4: A gynotikilobomassophile is one who loves to nibble women’s earlobes.: http://wordinfo.info/unit/2789
Page 282, Position 1: The Afrikaans for an elephant’s trunk is slurp.: http://translate.definitions.net/trunk/AF
Page 282, Position 2: Brenda means ‘inside’ in Albanian.: http://www.majstro.com/dictionaries/Albanian-English/brenda
Page 282, Position 3: Baghdad means ‘God’s gift’ in Persian.: http://islam.about.com/cs/history/a/aa040703a.htm
Page 282, Position 4: The first man to use the word ‘bored’ was Lord Byron in 1823.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 283, Position 1: The world’s oldest living thing is a patch of Mediterranean sea-grass between Spain and Cyprus. It is estimated to be 200,000 years old.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9066393/Ancient-seagrass-Oldest-living-thing-on-earth-discovered-in-Mediterranean-Sea.html
Page 283, Position 2: The 225-year-old typeface of the tea company Twinings is the oldest continuously used commercial logo in existence.: http://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings
Page 283, Position 3: Every time he made a cup of coffee, Beethoven counted out exactly 60 beans to make sure it was always exactly the same strength.: Norman Kolpas, Coffee (1979)
Page 283, Position 4: A female chimpanzee in a fit of passion has the strength of six men.: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2/can-a-90-lb-chimp-clobber-a-full-grown-man
Page 284, Position 1: Higgs bosons, assuming they exist at all, exist for approximately one zeptosecond – a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.: http://www.npr.org/2012/07/06/156380366/at-long-last-the-higgs-particle-maybe
Page 284, Position 2: The Hundred Years War lasted for 116 years.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/06/what_to_call_a_war.html
Page 284, Position 3: There are more pigs in China than in the next 43 pork-producing countries combined.: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/how_food_explains_the_world?page=full
Page 284, Position 4: Some pigs suffer from mysophobia, the fear of mud.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/7448006.stm
Page 285, Position 1: Tyrosemiophile n. One who collects cheese labels.: http://french-windows.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/cheese-junkies.html
Page 285, Position 2: Ultracrepidarian n. Someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 285, Position 3: Zemblanity n. Bad luck occurring just as expected: the opposite of serendipity.: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-zem1.htm
Page 285, Position 4: Zinzulation n. The sound made by power saws.: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Zinzulation
Page 286, Position 1: The seven years’ preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics reduced unemployment in the city to zero and increased the average income by 89.9%.: http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjb/zwjg/zwbd/t958857.htm
Page 286, Position 2: Many of the doves released at the opening ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics were accidentally roasted alive when the Olympic flame was lit.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/apr/10/youtubearchive
Page 286, Position 3: More than 50% of Team GB’s medals in the 2012 London Olympics were won in sports where the athlete is sitting down or kneeling.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/19226072
Page 286, Position 4: At the 2012 London Olympics, which lasted for 17 days, the athletes were provided with 150,000 free condoms – approximately 15 each.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/07/safe-sex-london-2012-olympic
Page 287, Position 1: British troops in India during the Second World War were issued with the memorable advice: ‘Defeat the Axis, Use Prophylaxis’.: BBC History, September 2012
Page 287, Position 2: In 1951, more than 200 British MPs were voted in by over 50% of their electorate. In 2001, none were.: http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/ge51/i01.htm"http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/mps01.htm
Page 287, Position 3: 99% of all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary do not derive from Old English, but 60% of the most commonly used words do.: http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/blog/P765/
Page 287, Position 4: Francach is an Irish word that means both ‘rat’ and ‘Frenchman’.: Vicki Mahaffey, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment (1998) p. 24.
Page 288, Position 1: Argentine scientists have discovered that giving hamsters Viagra helps them recover from jet lag up to 50% faster.: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11895-viagra-reduces-hamster-jet-lag.html
Page 288, Position 2: To dringle is to waste time in a lazy manner.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 288, Position 3: The UK is the fattest nation in the European Union and the 28th-fattest in the world.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1531127/Britain-becomes-the-fat-man-of-Europe.html"http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/07/worlds-fattest-countries-forbeslife-cx_ls_0208worldfat_2.html
Page 288, Position 4: The USA is the 9th-fattest nation in the world. Eight of the top ten are Pacific island nations, led by Nauru, Micronesia and the Cook Islands.: http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/07/worlds-fattest-countries-forbeslife-cx_ls_0208worldfat_2.html
Page 289, Position 1: The 1 million inhabitants of the Chinese city of Zhuji make 8 billion pairs of socks a year: 35% of total worldwide sock production.: https://www.chinabusinessreview.com/store/product/view/187
Page 289, Position 2: In Italy, 13 is not an unlucky number, but 17 is.: http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/european/bad-omen-for-italy-as-their-unlucky-number-comes-up-400380.html
Page 289, Position 3: Kailash Singh of India stopped washing after his wedding 38 years ago, hoping it would help him to have a son. To date, he has seven daughters.: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/23/man-quit-bathing_n_883027.html
Page 289, Position 4: Schimpf-los is a 24-hour German hotline that allows customers to release pent-up aggression by swearing at telephone operators.: http://www.schimpf-los.de/
Page 290, Position 1: Chamois can balance on a ledge less than two inches wide.: Rolf Harris, Mark Leigh and Mark Lepine, Tall Animal Tales: Amazing True Stories From The Star of TV's Animal Hospital (2001)"Chamois have elastic pads on their hooves to give them a grip on precipitous terrain.
Page 290, Position 2: Three-quarters of the French take their annual holiday in France.: http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article2003
Page 290, Position 3: The huge gong that was struck before Rank films was made of papier mâché.: http://www.papiermache.co.uk/articles/interesting-facts/
Page 290, Position 4: To ‘baffle’ someone once meant to subject them to public disgrace by hanging their picture upside down.: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.03.0068:entry=baffle
Page 291, Position 1: Edward Elgar (1857–1934) is the only major composer to have mastered the bassoon.: David Mason Greene, Greene's Biographical Encyclopaedia of Composers"(1986)"If anyone can find another major composer who was also a faggotist (bassoon player) then please let us know.
Page 291, Position 2: The Wars of the Roses weren’t called that. Sir Walter Scott invented the name four centuries after the conflict.: http://www.bloreheath.org/wars.php
Page 291, Position 3: A walleteer is an indispensable word for someone who has a wallet.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 291, Position 4: Before becoming an artist, Magritte was a professional wallpaper designer.: http://www.abcgallery.com/M/magritte/magritte.html
Page 292, Position 1: The playwright Tennessee Williams (1911–83) choked to death on a bottle cap.: http://resources.mhs.vic.edu.au/streetcar/biography.htm
Page 292, Position 2: If the mass in a one-kilogram bag of sugar could be converted into energy, it would be enough to drive a car non-stop for 100,000 years.: https://espace.cern.ch/be-dep/OP/AD/Antimatter%20world/Home.aspx
Page 292, Position 3: There were no recorded boxing matches anywhere in the world between the fall of the Roman Empire and 1681.: http://www.boxforfitness.com/Boxing-Training-Robina/history-of-boxing.html
Page 292, Position 4: Only three of the original 60 clauses of Magna Carta are still in force.: http://www.davros.org/legal/magna_carta.html
Page 293, Position 1: The soldiers of Edward III dressed up as swans for banquets. The king himself came as a pheasant.: W. Mark Ormrod, Edward III (2012)
Page 293, Position 2: The EU spends over a billion Euros a year on translation.: http://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers/volumes/serbian-executive-summary-en
Page 293, Position 3: A third of the 250 Americans who catch leprosy every year get it from armadillos.: http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/leprosy/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier%20%20
Page 293, Position 4: 90% of the bullets bought by the Ministry of Defence are used for training purposes.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9498883/Readied-aimed-fired-to-Helmand-and-back.html
Page 294, Position 1: The number of ten-year-olds in Britain who hold legal shotgun licences is 26.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/10yearolds-have-shotgun-licences-2164848.html
Page 294, Position 2: More than a third of the world’s smokers are Chinese.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13467728
Page 294, Position 3: A lethal dose of caffeine is about 50 double espressos.: http://www.abc.net.au/health/library/stories/2006/04/27/1829125.htm#.UGLcgKTybCo
Page 294, Position 4: Red Bull was originally called Red Water Buffalo.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17590103
Page 295, Position 1: President Obama’s secret-service nickname is ‘Renegade’. Ronald Reagan’s nickname was ‘Rawhide’, Bill Clinton’s was ‘Eagle’ and George W. Bush was known as ‘Trailblazer’.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/3452281/Renegade-and-Renaissance-Obama-to-replace-Trailblazer-and-Tempo-Bush-in-the-White-House.html
Page 295, Position 2: MI5 used to own special kettles that it kept specifically for steaming open envelopes.: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2de84ef0-e4f7-11e0-9aa8-00144feabdc0.html
Page 295, Position 3: Sitting in a 15-minute meeting uses more energy than Usain Bolt expends over three 100-metre sprints.: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/08/daily-chart-olympics-4
Page 295, Position 4: Almost any domestic cat can run faster than Usain Bolt.: http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/14242/1/Amazing-Facts-About-Cats.html
Page 296, Position 1: Over a distance of about a mile, a carrier pigeon is faster than a fax machine.: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19901028&id=TEIyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=AuYFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2346,7657979
Page 296, Position 2: Modern homing pigeons find it more convenient to follow motorways and ring roads and turn left and right at junctions rather than using their in-built navigational abilities.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3460977.stm
Page 296, Position 3: Brazil nuts are the most radioactive natural foodstuff.: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interact/facts.html
Page 296, Position 4: The Oxford English Dictionary takes 9,000 words to describe the 45 different meanings of ‘at’.: The Oxford English Dictionary
Page 297, Position 1: A male rhinoceros beetle can lift 850 times its own body weight.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18996429
Page 297, Position 2: Alan Turing, the father of computer science, chained his mug to a radiator to stop anyone else at work from using it.: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-06/18/turing-timeline
Page 297, Position 3: The proud owner of the first silicone breast implant was a dog called Esmeralda.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17511491
Page 297, Position 4: There are only two beret factories left in France.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9491239.stm
Page 298, Position 1: In 1367, King Charles V of France explicitly banned the wearing of shoes shaped like penises.: http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=13345&amid=13345
Page 298, Position 2: In 2008, pet hamsters were banned in Vietnam.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7283299.stm
Page 298, Position 3: Monty Python’s Life of Brian was marketed in Sweden as ‘The film that’s so funny, it was banned in Norway.’: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/6679546/What-did-Life-of-Brian-ever-do-for-us.html
Page 298, Position 4: The banning of the fez in Turkey in 1925 led to riots, executions and a thriving fez-smuggling trade.: http://www.historyhouse.com/c/in_history/?fez_2
Page 299, Position 1: The Turkish for ‘ski’ is kayak.: http://www.idiocentrism.com/kayak.htm
Page 299, Position 2: Dalek is Croatian for ‘far-away thing’.: http://www.eudict.com/?lang=croeng&word=dalek
Page 299, Position 3: Smegma is Latin for ‘detergent’.: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/smegma
Page 299, Position 4: The Afrikaans for ‘astrology’ is sterrewiggelary.: http://af.wiktionary.org/wiki/sterrewiggelary
Page 300, Position 1: The first documented blood transfusion took place in 1492, when Pope Innocent VIII was given the blood of three ten-year-old boys.: http://www.news-medical.net/health/History-of-Blood-Transfusion.aspx
Page 300, Position 2: Vatican City is the only place in the world where cash machines offer instructions in Latin.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/28/inside-vatican-bank-silence-secrets-latin-cash-machines
Page 300, Position 3: Since the Second World War, only 20 babies born in the UK have been called Adolf.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7897580/Twenty-babies-in-Britain-named-Adolf.html
Page 300, Position 4: The ‘G-spot’ was nearly called the Whipple Tickle – after Professor Beverley Whipple, who coined the expression that we know today.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8443465.stm
Page 301, Position 1: Cow’s hooves are used to make the foam in fire extinguishers.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13670184
Page 301, Position 2: The first potatoes introduced to Britain were used to make desserts.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12674767
Page 301, Position 3: In 1976, one person in the USA was killed by an outbreak of swine flu, but the vaccine introduced to combat it killed 25.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8024240.stm
Page 301, Position 4: There are 1,000 times as many bacteria in your gut as there are stars in the Milky Way.: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/health/human-microbiome-project-decodes-our-100-trillion-good-bacteria.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www"http://www.esa.int/esaKIDSen/SEM536WJD1E_OurUniverse_0.html
Page 302, Position 1: Bacteria are about as different from viruses as metronomes are from giraffes.: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-viruses-alive-2004; What is alive and what isn't? Most biologists will say that viruses are not alive as they have no cellular structure; of course metronomes are not alive either, but they do at least move...
Page 302, Position 2: Most antibiotics are made from bacteria.: Ken Albala and Gary J. Allen, The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries (2007) p. 31.
Page 302, Position 3: Bacteria can get viruses.: http://www.scienceiq.com/Facts/BacteriaSometimesCatchAVirus.cfm
Page 302, Position 4: Viruses can get viruses. A new one recently discovered in a French cooling tower was found to be infected by another, smaller one.: http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2008/08/06/a-virophage-named-sputnik-furt/
Page 303, Position 1: Scallops have up to 100 eyes.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Pectinidae
Page 303, Position 2: The praying mantis has only one ear, which is located between its legs.: http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Animals/Archives/2010/How-the-Praying-Mantis-Hears.aspx
Page 303, Position 3: Until the 19th century the English word for actors was ‘hypocrites’.: http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320AncLit/chapters/06gktrag.htm
Page 303, Position 4: The Japanese for ‘handbag’ is handubagu.: http://www.japanesewordtranslation.com/h/handbag
Page 304, Position 1: In 1947, the Duke of Windsor bought the Duchess of Windsor a black patent leather Hermès wheelbarrow.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/a-wheelbarrow-fit-for-a-duchess-7687533.html
Page 304, Position 2: In 1915, the lock millionaire Cecil Chubb bought his wife Stonehenge. She didn’t like it, so in 1918 he gave it to the nation.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/wiltshire/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_9020000/9020849.stm
Page 304, Position 3: Since 1815, Belgium has paid the Duke of Wellington’s family more than $46 million as a reward for winning the battle of Waterloo.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/jun/07/andrewosborn
Page 304, Position 4: The First World War officially ended on 3rd October 2010.: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/8039192/Germany-finally-pays-off-First-World-War-debt.html
Page 305, Position 1: Wars kill more civilians than soldiers: in a war, the safest place to be is usually in the army.: http://www.unicef.org/graca/patterns.htm
Page 305, Position 2: The world’s worst maritime disaster was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine in 1945, with the loss of 9,343 lives.: http://www.wilhelmgustloff.com/facts_didyouknow.htm
Page 305, Position 3: 35 years after leaving school, the majority of people can still identify 90% of their classmates.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/dec/13/sciencenews.research
Page 305, Position 4: The speed of the wind has fallen by 60% in the last 30 years.: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101017/full/news.2010.543.html
Page 306, Position 1: Half of all the species in the world live in the rainforest canopy.: http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/rainforest_gallery.html
Page 306, Position 2: The human brain is more complex than an exploding star or the US economy.: http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/18-01-2011/116557-brain-0/; The human brain is more complicated than pretty much anything you can name. Except two human brains.
Page 306, Position 3: Every day, plants convert sunlight into energy equivalent to six times the entire power consumption of human civilisation.: http://dpb.carnegiescience.edu/research/light-life
Page 306, Position 4: For a million years, the human population of the Earth was less than 26,000.: http://phys.org/news183278038.html
Page 307, Position 1: The last two speakers of the Mexican language Zoque are both in their seventies and refuse to speak to one another.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/also_in_the_news/7097647.stm
Page 307, Position 2: More than one in five Americans believes that the world will end in their lifetime.: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/01/us-mayancalendar-poll-idUSBRE8400XH20120501
Page 307, Position 3: Thomas Edison’s last breath is held in a vial at the Henry Ford museum in Detroit.: http://www.thehenryford.org/exhibits/pic/2004/july.asp
Page 307, Position 4: 99% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct.: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/03/bird-flu-virus-scientists-warning