70 Fun Facts About Quick

Which city became Australia's capital, a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne?

Canberra: the constitution itself fixed the deal, placing the capital in Sydney's state but at least 100 miles from the city. Parliament sat in Melbourne until 1927, while an American architect's prize-winning plan took shape.

In which direction does the Nile flow through Egypt?

North: it runs 'up' the map to the Mediterranean, which is why Upper Egypt, the upstream half of the ancient kingdom, is the part in the south.

Which is the largest ocean on Earth?

Pacific: it covers about a third of the planet, more than all of Earth's land put together. Magellan named it 'peaceful' after finding its waters far calmer than the stormy seas he had just come through.

Which country overtook China in 2023 to become the world's most populous?

India: the UN reckons it took the lead in April 2023, with both giants at more than 1.4 billion people. Its rival's population had just begun to shrink, for the first time in 60 years.

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

China: the neighbours long disagreed over the mountain's height, because China measured to the rock summit while Nepal counted the snow on top. In 2020 they surveyed it together and agreed on 8,848.86 metres.

What is the official currency of Japan?

Yen: the name simply means 'round', after the shape of a coin. The Chinese yuan and the Korean won go back to the very same word, so East Asia's best-known currencies all share one name at root.

Which is the smallest sovereign state in the world?

Vatican City: its 44 hectares became a state only in 1929. The treaty that created it ended a standoff of almost 60 years, which began when the popes lost Rome and the rest of their lands in 1870.

What is the largest hot desert in the world?

Sahara: only the polar deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic are larger, and it has not always been dry. Until roughly 5,000 years ago much of it was grassland dotted with lakes, where people hunted and fished.

The city of Marrakesh is in which country?

Morocco: the country takes its very name from this city, which was long its capital. Marrakesh itself is nicknamed the Red City, after the colour of its old clay walls and buildings.

The Danube crosses Europe from Germany to Romania before emptying into which sea?

Black Sea: some 6,000 years ago the river's mouth was an open bay. The silt it has carried across Europe ever since has filled that bay and built a vast delta of reed beds and lakes, the best preserved on the continent.

Mount Kilimanjaro is in which country?

Tanzania holds the whole mountain, but Kenya owns a famous view of it: Kilimanjaro is the backdrop to the elephant herds of Amboseli National Park, just across the border.

Which element has the chemical symbol Fe?

Iron is Fe because the Swedish chemist Berzelius proposed in 1813 that element symbols come from Latin names, and the Latin for iron is ferrum, the root of 'farrier', a shoer of horses.

Which is the largest planet in the Solar System?

Jupiter is so massive that it doesn't simply circle the Sun: the two orbit a shared balance point that lies just outside the Sun's surface.

Which gas do plants take in for photosynthesis?

Carbon dioxide supplies the carbon for the plant's sugars, but the oxygen a leaf gives off doesn't come from it: that oxygen is released when the plant splits water.

How many bones does an adult human body typically have?

206 is the usual adult count: a newborn has roughly 270 to 300 bones, and many fuse over the years, with the five vertebrae that become the sacrum joining only in early adulthood.

Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?

300,000 km/s sounds instant, yet sunlight still needs about eight minutes to reach Earth, so we always see the Sun as it was eight minutes ago.

Which protein makes red blood cells red and carries oxygen around the body?

Hemoglobin is the red protein that packs each red blood cell; as the cell matures it even expels its own nucleus, leaving little more than a flexible bag of oxygen carriers.

What is the largest organ of the human body?

Skin never stops rebuilding itself: new cells take about a month to work their way up to the surface, where they die and flake off.

At what temperature does water boil in degrees Fahrenheit?

212 °F holds only at sea level: the boiling point drops about 1 °F for every 500 feet climbed, so food boiled in the mountains cooks at a lower temperature and takes longer.

What does DNA stand for?

Deoxyribonucleic acid is named for its sugar, deoxyribose: literally ribose, the sugar in RNA, with one oxygen atom removed.

Which is the nearest star to Earth after the Sun?

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf so dim that it can't be seen with the naked eye, even though no other star lies closer; its Latin name simply means 'nearest of Centaurus'.

Penguins live almost exclusively in which hemisphere?

Southern waters are home to nearly every wild penguin, and not only icy ones: the Galápagos penguin lives right on the equator, kept cool by cold ocean currents.

Which US president said 'tear down this wall' in Berlin?

Reagan kept the line over his own advisers' objections: the State Department and the National Security Council both tried to have it cut from the 1987 speech.

Who was the first human to travel into space?

Yuri Gagarin didn't land inside his capsule: he ejected about four miles above the ground and came down under his own parachute.

The Titanic sank on its maiden voyage to which city?

New York received the survivors anyway: the liner Carpathia, which had left the city days earlier bound for the Mediterranean, pulled them from the lifeboats and turned back.

Machu Picchu was built by which civilization?

The Inca abandoned the citadel around the time of the Spanish conquest, yet the conquistadors never found it, and it survived nearly intact.

Which monarch sealed Magna Carta?

King John's promise did not last: about ten weeks later the Pope annulled the charter, and England slid into civil war.

Who was British Prime Minister for most of the Second World War?

Winston Churchill led Britain to victory in Europe in May 1945, yet voters turned him out in a Labour landslide that July, weeks before Japan surrendered.

Which landmark burned in London's Great Fire?

St Paul's Cathedral burned so fiercely that the lead on its roof melted and ran into the streets; Christopher Wren's domed replacement took more than thirty years to build.

At which battle was Napoleon finally defeated in 1815?

Waterloo was a battle Wellington chose to fight only because the Prussians had promised to join him, and their arrival on Napoleon's right flank that afternoon turned it.

Nelson Mandela became president of which country in 1994?

South Africa made him president just over four years after he walked out of prison, where he had been held since 1962.

How many players does a soccer team have on the pitch?

11 is only the starting number: the laws say a match can't go on once either team drops below seven players, so a run of red cards or injuries can end a game early.

How many rings are on the Olympic flag?

5 rings stand for the five continents of the Olympic world, but no colour belongs to any one of them: Coubertin chose colours that, with the white background, appear on every nation's flag.

Which country hosted the 2016 Summer Olympics?

Brazil's football-mad hosts finally won their first Olympic gold in the sport at these Games, settled by Neymar's penalty in a shoot-out against Germany.

Wimbledon is played on which surface?

Grass used to be the rule, not the exception: the US Open left it after 1974 and the Australian Open in 1988, which made Wimbledon the last major played on a lawn.

How long is a marathon?

26.2 miles is a royal leftover: the 1908 London Olympic race was laid out to start at Windsor Castle and finish in front of the royal box, and that odd length later became the standard.

In golf, what is a score of one under par on a hole called?

Birdie is thought to come from old American slang, in which a 'bird' was anything excellent; the bigger birds, eagle and albatross, followed for still better scores.

Basketball's first hoops were baskets made for which fruit?

Peaches gave the game its first hoops: James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to a gym balcony rail that happened to be 10 feet up, and that height stuck.

What is the dried seaweed used to wrap sushi rolls called?

Nori farming in Japan was rescued after a British botanist, Kathleen Drew-Baker, published the life cycle of a related seaweed in 1949; Japan still honours her as the 'Mother of the Sea'.

Guacamole is based on which fruit?

Avocado is in the name itself: guacamole comes from the Aztec language's ahuacamolli, 'avocado sauce', and the same word for sauce gives Mexico its mole.

True Champagne must come from a wine region in which country?

France guards the name so closely that a Swiss village called Champagne, which has made wine for centuries, had to stop putting its own name on its bottles.

Marzipan is made mainly from sugar and which nut?

Almond is what makes it marzipan: grind apricot kernels with the sugar instead and the cheaper look-alike goes by another name, persipan.

Tofu is made from the milk of which bean?

Soybean milk is treated much as dairy milk is for cheese: a coagulant, traditionally a salt, splits it into curds and whey, and the curds are pressed into blocks.

Hummus is made from which legume?

Its full Arabic name means chickpeas with tahini.

Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of which band?

Queen was his choice of name: he joined Brian May and Roger Taylor's band Smile as its new singer, renamed it, and then renamed himself too, from Farrokh Bulsara.

How many strings does a standard guitar have?

6 took centuries to arrive: Renaissance guitars had only four courses of strings and Baroque ones five, before the modern six-string took over.

Which composer wrote the 'Moonlight Sonata'?

Beethoven never called it that: his own title was a sonata 'in the manner of a fantasy', and the moonlight came from the poet Ludwig Rellstab, who pictured a moonlit lake in its first movement.

What was the first feature-length animated film produced in the United States?

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was mocked as 'Disney's Folly' during production, then won Walt Disney a one-off honorary Oscar: one full-size statuette and seven miniature ones.

Who directed the 1975 film Jaws?

Steven Spielberg's mechanical sharks kept breaking down at sea, so for much of the film he let John Williams's two-note theme stand in for the monster.

The Beatles formed in which English city?

Liverpool record-shop manager Brian Epstein saw the band play a lunchtime set at the city's Cavern Club in 1961, became their manager and won them a record deal with Parlophone.

How many keys does a standard modern piano have?

88 is only the standard: Bösendorfer's Imperial concert grand adds nine extra bass keys for a total of 97, a full eight octaves.

Which singer is known as 'The King of Rock and Roll'?

Elvis Presley didn't always accept the crown: at a 1969 Las Vegas press conference he pointed to Fats Domino in the room and called him the real king of rock and roll.

Who wrote the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?

George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Blair, wrote it on the remote Scottish island of Jura while gravely ill with tuberculosis, and died within months of its publication.

In the Harry Potter novels, the Hogwarts Express leaves from which London station?

King's Cross was a personal choice: the author's parents met on a train to Scotland that left from the station.

Who wrote Pride and Prejudice?

Jane Austen first called it 'First Impressions'; a London publisher turned it down in 1797, and when it finally appeared in 1813 it did not carry her name.

Who created the detective Sherlock Holmes?

Arthur Conan Doyle grew tired of his detective and sent him over the Reichenbach Falls in 1893; readers cancelled magazine subscriptions in protest, and he eventually brought Holmes back.

Who wrote Don Quixote?

Miguel de Cervantes was beaten to his own sequel: an impostor published a fake Part Two in 1614, so in the real one Don Quixote hears of it and changes his route to prove it wrong.

What does HTML stand for?

Hypertext Markup Language came out of a physics lab: Tim Berners-Lee specified it at CERN in 1990, alongside the first web browser and server.

Who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates?

Paul Allen and Gates wrote their first product, a version of BASIC for the Altair computer, without ever having an Altair: they tested it on a simulator Allen had written.

The car company Tesla is named after an inventor with which first name?

Nikola Tesla's name was chosen in 2003 by the company's founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning; Elon Musk arrived the following year as its main investor.

Steve Jobs called the iPhone a phone, an internet communicator and what?

iPod, in widescreen form, was one of three products Jobs announced at Macworld in January 2007, before he revealed that they were not separate devices but one.

A classic Sudoku grid has how many rows?

9 rows, 9 columns and 9 boxes: despite its Japanese name, the puzzle first appeared in an American magazine in 1979 as Number Place, and reached Japan only in 1984.

The Rubik's Cube was invented by a professor from which country?

Hungary's Ernő Rubik built the first cube in Budapest in 1974, scrambled it, and then needed about a month to work out how to solve his own puzzle.

The Mona Lisa, stolen in 1911, was recovered in which country?

Italy is where it surfaced: Vincenzo Peruggia, who had worked at the Louvre, hid the painting for more than two years and was caught trying to sell it in Florence.

Which is the fastest land animal?

Cheetah speed is strictly a sprint: the cat can hold its top pace for only a few hundred metres, and it cannot roar, chirping and purring instead.

What is the largest animal known to have ever lived?

Blue whale meals are the surprise: the biggest animal ever lives almost entirely on krill, tiny shrimp-like animals it strains from seawater by the tonne.

How many squares are on a chessboard?

64 counts only the single squares, eight rows of eight; add every larger square you can outline on the board, up to the board itself, and the total rises to 204.

Which planet is second from the Sun?

Venus is the hottest planet even though Mercury sits closer to the Sun: its thick atmosphere traps heat, leaving the surface hot enough to melt lead.

Which animal has three hearts and blue blood?

Octopus hearts share the work: two pump blood through the gills and one serves the body, and that main heart stops beating when the animal swims, which is why it prefers to crawl.

Which is the heaviest and largest living bird?

Ostrich legs make up for the lost flight: it is the only bird with just two toes on each foot, an adaptation for sprinting, and a cornered bird defends itself with dangerous kicks.