100 Fun Facts About Eighth Grade

In what city was the U.S. Constitution written and signed in 1787?

The convention met at Independence Hall from May to September; Washington, D.C. did not exist yet.

How many articles does the original U.S. Constitution contain?

The first three set up the legislative, executive and judicial branches; the seventh explains how the document would be ratified.

How many times has the U.S. Constitution been amended?

The most recent, the 27th, deals with congressional pay and was ratified in 1992, more than 200 years after it was proposed.

What is the collective name for the first ten amendments to the Constitution?

They were ratified on December 15, 1791, largely thanks to the efforts of James Madison in the House.

Which amendment protects freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly and petition?

The Second covers the right to bear arms and the Fifth guards against self-incrimination.

The Fourth Amendment protects people against what?

Police generally need a warrant based on probable cause, a rule that grew out of British searches of colonial homes.

The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4 of which year?

The Second Continental Congress adopted it, and fifty-six delegates eventually signed.

Who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence?

Jefferson wrote most of it between June 11 and 28; Franklin and Adams were on the drafting committee with him.

Per the Declaration of Independence, people have the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of what?

John Locke had written 'life, liberty and property'; Jefferson swapped the last word.

Which battles in April 1775 were the first of the American Revolutionary War?

Paul Revere's ride the night before warned the countryside that British troops were marching from Boston.

Which 1781 siege was the decisive final victory of the Revolutionary War?

French ships blocked the British escape by sea, and King George III's government began negotiating peace.

Which country signed a Treaty of Alliance with the American revolutionaries in 1778?

The alliance came after the American victory at Saratoga convinced Europe the rebels could win.

Which 1783 peace agreement ended the Revolutionary War and recognised American independence?

Confusingly, another Treaty of Paris in 1898 ended the Spanish-American War.

What did the Sons of Liberty dump into the harbour during the Boston Tea Party in 1773?

Disguised as Native Americans, they boarded the Dartmouth and other ships in protest at the Tea Act; Britain answered with the Intolerable Acts.

From which country did the United States buy the Louisiana Territory in 1803?

Napoleon needed money for war in Europe, and the deal nearly doubled the size of the country.

Roughly how much did the United States pay for the Louisiana Purchase?

That worked out to only a few cents an acre for about 828,000 square miles.

Which president sent Lewis and Clark to explore the West in 1804?

The Corps of Discovery left Camp Dubois in May 1804 and first sighted the ocean in November 1805.

Sacagawea, who helped the Lewis and Clark expedition as an interpreter, belonged to which nation?

She travelled with her husband Toussaint Charbonneau and her newborn son.

Which building did the British burn in August 1814 during the War of 1812?

The American win at New Orleans came in January 1815, after the peace treaty had already been signed in Ghent.

Francis Scott Key wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner' after watching the bombardment of which fort in 1814?

The poem was set to an English club tune and did not become the official national anthem until 1931.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warned which group of countries not to colonise the Americas?

It was written mostly by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and largely ignored abroad at first.

Which president signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that led to the Trail of Tears?

About 60,000 people from the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations were forced west; thousands died on the way.

What was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, founded in 1607?

Only 60 of 214 settlers survived the 'Starving Time' winter of 1609-10 before a cash crop turned things around.

Which crop, first harvested successfully by John Rolfe in 1614, made the Virginia colony profitable?

Rolfe also married Pocahontas, bringing a few years of peace between the settlers and the Powhatan.

The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was the first governing document of which colony?

Forty-one of the ship's 101 passengers signed it while anchored off Cape Cod.

Where did the American Civil War begin in April 1861?

Confederate guns opened fire on the Union-held fort in Charleston harbour; the war lasted until 1865.

Who was president of the Confederate States during the Civil War?

Eleven states seceded to form the Confederacy, holding about a third of the U.S. population.

Where did Robert E. Lee surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865?

Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier, on January 1, 1863.

Which amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States?

It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments; the 15th (1870) barred denying the vote on account of race.

The Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War ended with a political compromise in which year?

The Freedmen's Bureau had provided food and shelter to formerly enslaved people, but poll taxes and literacy tests soon followed.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, was killed in an 1804 duel by which man?

Hamilton was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis and wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers.

The Great Depression began with a stock market crash in which year?

By 1933 U.S. unemployment had reached 25 percent, and Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal.

Which law of motion states that an object stays at rest or in uniform motion unless a force acts on it?

It is also called the law of inertia; all three laws appeared in Newton's Principia in 1687.

Newton's third law says that for every action there is what?

That is why a rocket moves forward as it pushes exhaust backward.

Elements in the modern periodic table are arranged in order of increasing what?

Atomic number is the number of protons; the horizontal rows are periods and the columns are groups.

Which Russian chemist published the first widely accepted periodic table in 1869?

He left gaps for elements that had not yet been discovered and predicted their properties.

What is the name for the elements in Group 18 of the periodic table, such as helium and neon?

They rarely react with other elements because their outer shells are full.

Which subatomic particle carries a negative charge?

Protons are positive and neutrons have no charge, so the nucleus as a whole is positive.

Atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons are called what?

Carbon-12 and carbon-14 are isotopes; the second is used for radiocarbon dating.

Which organelle is where aerobic respiration produces most of a cell's ATP?

The nucleus houses the chromosomes; plant cells also have chloroplasts and a cellulose cell wall.

Who discovered and named cells in 1665 after looking at cork under a microscope?

He thought the tiny compartments looked like the cells monks lived in.

Cells that lack a membrane-bound nucleus, such as bacteria, are called what?

Their DNA sits in a region called the nucleoid instead.

Photosynthesis takes in carbon dioxide, water and light and releases which gas?

It happens in chloroplasts using chlorophyll, which reflects green light, which is why leaves look green.

Chlorophyll gives leaves their colour by doing what with the middle part of the visible light spectrum?

The pigment absorbs mainly red and blue light and bounces the green part of the spectrum back at your eyes.

Which layer of the Earth is the thickest?

The mantle reaches down about 2,890 km; the crust is only 5 to 70 km thick.

Earth's inner core is mostly made of which metal?

It is solid, unlike the liquid outer core, and scientists know this because it transmits shear waves.

Which meteorologist proposed the theory of continental drift in 1912?

He argued that today's continents once formed one landmass; plate tectonics confirmed the idea 50 years later.

What was the name of the single supercontinent that later broke apart into today's continents?

Plates move only 10 to 160 millimetres a year, so the split took well over a hundred million years.

What powers the water cycle?

About 97 percent of Earth's water is stored in the oceans, where most evaporation happens.

Density is defined as mass divided by what?

Liquid water is about 1 g/cm3, so anything less dense than that floats.

Which ancient Greek reportedly shouted 'Eureka!' after realising water displacement reveals volume?

The story says he was checking whether a king's crown was pure gold and ran through the streets without his clothes.

On the pH scale, a solution with a value below 7 is described as what?

The scale is logarithmic, so pH 4 is ten times more acidic than pH 5; it was introduced by Sørensen in 1909.

Kinetic energy is the energy an object has because of what?

The formula is one half times mass times speed squared, and it is measured in joules.

Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?

Sunlight takes a little over eight minutes to reach Earth; the exact figure, 299,792,458 m/s, now defines the metre.

In a right triangle, the Pythagorean theorem states that a² + b² equals what?

The theorem is named for a Greek philosopher born around 570 BC, and one book collects 370 different proofs of it.

A right triangle with legs of 3 and 4 has a hypotenuse of what length?

Plutarch wrote that the ancient Egyptians already knew the 3-4-5 triangle.

In the equation y = mx + b, what does m represent?

Slope is rise over run; a horizontal line has a slope of zero.

Two lines are perpendicular when the product of their slopes equals what?

Parallel lines, by contrast, have equal slopes.

Which of these numbers is prime?

A prime has no divisors except 1 and itself; 2 is the only even prime, and Euclid proved there are infinitely many.

Is the number 1 considered a prime number?

A prime must be greater than 1 and not the product of two smaller natural numbers.

The interior angles of any triangle add up to how many degrees?

An equilateral triangle has three equal sides, an isosceles two, and a scalene none.

What is the formula for the area of a circle?

Circumference is 2πr, and π is roughly 3.14159.

In the mnemonic PEMDAS, what does the E stand for?

Multiplication and division share the same rank and are done left to right; the UK version is BODMAS.

Written in scientific notation, the coefficient m in m × 10ⁿ is normally between which two values?

Earth's mass, for example, is about 5.97 × 10²⁴ kg.

Who narrates S. E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders?

Hinton started the book at 15 and it was published when she was 18; Francis Ford Coppola filmed it in 1983.

In The Outsiders, the greasers' wealthy rivals are known by what name?

Short for 'Socials', it is pronounced 'SOH-shiz'; the story is set in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Anne Frank received her diary as a present for which birthday?

She got it on 12 June 1942 and addressed her entries to 'Kitty'; her father Otto published the diary in 1947.

In which city did Anne Frank and her family hide in the annex behind her father's business?

Anne died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

In Lois Lowry's The Giver, what role is 12-year-old Jonas assigned?

The novel won the 1994 Newbery Medal; its community lives under a system called Sameness.

Who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960?

The story is told by Scout Finch, whose father Atticus defends Tom Robinson in Maycomb, Alabama.

What is the profession of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird?

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize a year after publication and has sold more than 30 million copies.

Romeo and Juliet belong to which two feuding families?

Shakespeare set the play in Verona and opened it with a 14-line prologue in the form of a sonnet.

Which figure of speech compares two things using the words 'like' or 'as'?

'Odysseus is like a weasel' is a simile; drop the 'like' and it becomes a metaphor.

Which river, generally regarded as the world's longest, flows north into the Mediterranean Sea?

Its two main tributaries, the White Nile and Blue Nile, meet at Khartoum in Sudan.

Mount Everest sits on the border between Nepal and which other country?

It rises 8,848.86 m and was first climbed in 1953 by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.

What is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceans?

It covers about 46 percent of the planet's water surface, and Magellan named it 'Mar Pacífico', the peaceful sea.

The Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on Earth, lies in which trench?

It reaches about 10,928 metres down, deeper than Everest is tall.

How many words long is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?

He delivered it in under two minutes on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery.

How many articles of amendment did Congress send to the states in 1789, of which ten became the Bill of Rights?

One of the leftovers, on congressional pay, was finally ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment.

How does lowering the surrounding air pressure affect the boiling point of a liquid?

That is why water boils below 100 °C at high altitude, where atmospheric pressure is lower.

Shays's Rebellion (1786–87) saw indebted farmers march on an armory in which state?

The national government could not afford troops to put it down under the Articles of Confederation, which helped convince leaders to call the 1787 convention.

For apportioning the House, the 1787 Constitution counted each enslaved person as what fraction?

The clause handed Southern states extra House seats and electoral votes; the 14th Amendment made it obsolete in 1868.

Marbury v. Madison (1803) established which power of the Supreme Court?

Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Madison had acted illegally yet declined to order him to deliver the commission, striking down part of the Judiciary Act instead.

Which machine, patented by Eli Whitney in 1794, separated fibers from seeds?

Whitney hoped it would cut the labor needed, but it made the crop so profitable that plantations bought more enslaved workers to pick it.

The canal completed across New York in 1825 linked the Hudson River to which body of water?

Opponents mocked it as 'Clinton's Big Ditch', yet tolls repaid the state's construction debt within the first year.

The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was the first gathering devoted to which cause?

It met in a Wesleyan chapel for two days in July and was followed two weeks later by another convention in Rochester.

Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which state entered the Union as a free state?

The deal also banned slavery in Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ parallel, a line Henry Clay helped push through a deadlocked House.

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended which war?

Mexico gave up 55 percent of its territory, including all of present-day California and Nevada.

The first transcontinental railroad was joined at Promontory Summit in 1869, in which territory?

Leland Stanford drove the ceremonial last spike on May 10, 1869, completing a 1,911-mile line from Council Bluffs, Iowa to the Pacific.

Who was the first U.S. president to be impeached, in 1868?

The Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed to remove him after he tried to replace War Secretary Edwin Stanton.

Which rock type forms when magma or lava cools and hardens?

The name comes from the Latin igneus, meaning fiery; it is one of the three main rock types alongside sedimentary and metamorphic.

Which mineral sits at the top of the Mohs hardness scale with a value of 10?

The scale is only ordinal: the top mineral is about four times harder than corundum at 9 in absolute terms.

Gregor Mendel worked out dominant and recessive traits by cross-breeding which crop?

He tracked seven traits such as seed colour and published in 1866; the last of his seven genes was only pinned down in 2025.

Heat moving from a stove burner into a pan touching it is an example of what?

Convection carries heat in moving fluids, while radiation needs no matter at all, which is how sunlight warms Earth.

Which band of the electromagnetic spectrum has the highest frequency?

Their wavelengths are smaller than an atomic nucleus; Paul Villard first spotted them in 1900 while studying radium.

California's San Andreas Fault is the classic example of which type of plate boundary?

The Pacific and North American plates slide past each other at 20 to 35 mm a year; part of the central section creeps without earthquakes.

A real number that cannot be written as a ratio of two integers is called what?

The square root of 2 was likely the first number proved to be one; pi is the most famous.

What is the sum of the exterior angles of any convex polygon, in degrees?

Walking once around any convex polygon turns you through exactly one full revolution, however many sides it has.

In Flowers for Algernon, what kind of animal is Algernon?

Charlie Gordon, a janitor with an IQ of 68, becomes the first human to receive the same intelligence-boosting surgery.

In Poe's 'The Raven', what single word does the bird keep repeating?

First published in January 1845, the poem follows a grieving lover mourning Lenore as the bird perches on a bust of Pallas.