50 Fun Facts About School Subjects

Which sport did physical education teacher James Naismith invent in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891?

Basketball was first played with a soccer ball and a pair of peach baskets as goals. Naismith wrote the original 13 rules for his gym class.

Which Australian capital city was purpose-built as a compromise between rival cities Sydney and Melbourne?

Canberra is an entirely planned city, grounded in a design by American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. It settled a long dispute over which of the two larger cities should be the national capital.

Which branch of mathematics takes its name from an Arabic word in the title of a 9th-century book?

Algebra comes from al-jabr, an Arabic term that originally referred to the surgical setting of broken bones. The mathematician al-Khwarizmi used it in the title of his treatise on equations.

Which structures, nicknamed the powerhouse of the cell, use aerobic respiration to generate ATP?

Mitochondria got the powerhouse nickname from a 1957 Scientific American article by Philip Siekevitz. Their folded inner membrane increases the surface area for making ATP.

Which school subject takes its name from Ancient Greek words meaning 'Earth' and 'write'?

Geography literally means Earth writing, and the Greek scholar Eratosthenes may have coined the term more than 2,200 years ago.

Which gas makes up about 78 percent of the dry air in the Earth's atmosphere?

Nitrogen fills 78.08 percent of dry air, while the oxygen people breathe makes up only about 21 percent. Argon is a distant third at under 1 percent.

Which Greek thinker, born around 570 BC, gives his name to the theorem about right-angled triangles?

Pythagoras is credited with the rule that the square on a right triangle's longest side equals the sum of the squares on the other two. In antiquity he was also credited with discoveries in music and astronomy.

Which short Japanese poem traditionally follows a pattern of five, seven and five sound units?

Haiku traditionally carry a seasonal reference and a cutting word within their 17 sound units. In Japanese they are printed as a single line, though English versions often appear as three.

Which German composer was almost completely deaf when his Ninth Symphony premiered in Vienna in 1824?

Ludwig van Beethoven was still conducting after the music stopped, so a singer gently turned him around to see the audience's applause.

Which document did King John of England seal at Runnymede in 1215 to make peace with rebel barons?

Magna Carta promised the barons protection from illegal imprisonment and access to swift justice. Its Latin name simply means Great Charter.

Which kind of whole number, of which seven and thirteen are examples, is divisible only by 1 and itself?

Prime numbers are central to arithmetic because every whole number above 1 is either prime itself or a unique product of primes.

Which Greek letter stands for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, roughly 3.14?

Pi on its own was used for the circle ratio by Welsh mathematician William Jones in 1706, the earliest known case. Its decimal digits never end and never settle into a permanently repeating pattern.

In the PEMDAS order of operations taught in American schools, which operation does the letter E stand for?

Exponents come second in PEMDAS, after parentheses and before multiplication and division. Canada and New Zealand commonly teach the same order as BEDMAS.

Which ancient number system, still seen on many clock faces, writes fifty as the letter L?

Roman numerals use only seven letters, from I for 1 up to M for 1,000. Clock faces often show four as IIII, a practice going back to very early clocks.

Which number pattern, where each term is the sum of the two before it, reached Europe in the 1202 book Liber Abaci?

The Fibonacci sequence appears in the book as a way to calculate the growth of rabbit populations. It is named after the author, Leonardo of Pisa, who was also known as Fibonacci.

Which Italian scientist's name is attached to the constant that counts the particles in one mole of a substance?

Amedeo Avogadro proposed in 1811 that equal volumes of gas contain equal numbers of molecules, whatever the gas. The constant, about 6.022 × 10²³ per mole, is now fixed as an exact SI value.

Which chemist arranged the known elements into a periodic table and predicted three that were still undiscovered?

Dmitri Mendeleev used his periodic law to predict the properties of germanium, gallium and scandium before anyone had found them. The synthetic element mendelevium is named in his honour.

What is the chemical symbol for gold, the precious metal with atomic number 79?

Au is short for aurum, the Latin word for gold. Ag, which is often confused with it, comes from argentum and belongs to silver.

Which English scientist set out three laws of motion in his book known as the Principia?

Isaac Newton first published the Principia in 1687, written in Latin across three volumes. It also sets out his law of universal gravitation.

Which number system, credited to Gottfried Leibniz, do computers use because it needs only two symbols?

Binary writes every number with just 0 and 1, which makes it straightforward to build into digital electronic circuits using logic gates.

Which planet is home to the Great Red Spot, a giant storm watched by astronomers since 1831?

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is the largest anticyclonic storm in the Solar System. Around 1900 it stretched about three times the diameter of Earth, and it has shrunk since.

Which bone, the only one in the upper leg, is the longest in the human body?

The femur is rated the strongest bone in the body by some measures, though other studies suggest the temporal bone of the skull may be stronger.

Which naturalist set out the theory of natural selection in the book On the Origin of Species?

Charles Darwin spent five years sailing the world on HMS Beagle before writing it. Birds he collected on the Galápagos turned out to be twelve separate species of finches.

Which temperature scale, named after a Swedish astronomer, puts the boiling point of water at 100 degrees?

Celsius originally ran backwards: in the 1742 version, water boiled at 0 degrees and froze at 100. Others had flipped the scale by 1744, the year its inventor died.

Which process do plants use to make food from carbon dioxide and water using energy from light?

Photosynthesis is the main source of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Plants absorb the light with chlorophyll, a pigment that reflects green.

Which Polish-born scientist was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry?

Marie Curie shared the 1903 physics prize for research on radioactivity, then won the 1911 chemistry prize. She named the element polonium after her native country.

Which hardness ranking for minerals, introduced by a German geologist in 1812, puts diamond at the top with 10?

The Mohs scale works by scratching: a harder mineral leaves a mark on a softer one. Its steps are uneven, so diamond at 10 is about four times as hard as corundum at 9.

Which botanist formalised the two-part Latin naming system that labels humans Homo sapiens?

Carl Linnaeus formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He himself is designated the type specimen for the human species.

Which German scientist proposed in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth?

Alfred Wegener was known in his lifetime mainly for meteorology and polar research. Mainstream geology did not accept his drifting continents until the 1960s.

Which nutrient, found in meat, eggs and legumes, is built from chains of amino acids?

Protein supplies nine essential amino acids that the human body cannot make for itself, so they have to come from food.

Which part of speech, often formed in English by adding -ly, describes how an action is done?

Adverb forms without the ending exist too: flat adverbs, as in drive slow, look exactly like the matching adjective.

Which figure of speech compares two things explicitly, in English often using the words 'like' or 'as'?

A simile states its comparison openly, so saying a man is like a wolf counts as one. Saying the man is a wolf only implies the comparison.

Which playwright, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth?

William Shakespeare's acting company built its own theatre, the Globe, on the south bank of the River Thames in 1599.

Which Harper Lee novel features the lawyer Atticus Finch and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961?

To Kill a Mockingbird was in its 41st week on the bestseller list when the prize came, stunning its author. An early draft was titled Atticus.

Which term describes a word such as madam or racecar that reads the same backwards as forwards?

A palindrome can also be a number or a whole sentence. The longest single-word example in the Oxford English Dictionary has 12 letters and was coined by James Joyce for a knock on the door.

Which term describes words such as buzz, meow and tick tock that imitate the sound they name?

Onomatopoeia changes from language to language: a clock that goes tick tock in English says tic tac in Spanish and kachi kachi in Japanese.

Which ancient writing system did Jean-François Champollion decipher in the 1820s with the help of the Rosetta Stone?

Hieroglyphs became readable because the stone, found by Napoleon's troops in 1799, carries parallel scripts that include the Greek alphabet.

Which US president issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War?

Abraham Lincoln's order changed the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved people in the Confederate states from enslaved to free.

Which explorer from Genoa sailed for Spain in 1492 with the Santa María as his largest ship?

Christopher Columbus lost the Santa María on Christmas Day 1492, when it ran aground and had to be abandoned.

Which uprising began in 1789 when a crowd stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress holding arms and ammunition?

The French Revolution's most famous target was rumoured to hold many prisoners, but the Bastille held only seven on the day it fell.

Which ancient Greek city-state, reformed by Cleisthenes around 508 BC, is the most familiar democracy of its age?

Athens was not the first Greek city to adopt a democratic constitution, only the most familiar. Cleisthenes sorted its citizens into ten tribes based on where they lived.

Which name is given to the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, largely crafted by James Madison?

The Bill of Rights began as twelve proposed amendments that Congress sent to the states in 1789. Madison had at first opposed the idea of creating one.

Which Scottish thinker, seen by many as the father of economics, published The Wealth of Nations in 1776?

Adam Smith credited the growth of a nation's prosperity to the division of labour. His famous image of an invisible hand appears only once in the book.

Which ocean, named by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, covers about a third of the Earth's surface?

Pacific means peaceful: Magellan chose the name after finding calm waters once he had passed through the strait that now bears his name. The ocean is larger than all of Earth's land combined.

Which river already carries more water than any other on Earth by the time it enters Brazil?

The Amazon enters Brazil with only one-fifth of its final flow, and it disputes the title of the world's longest river with the Nile.

Which type of landform, such as Florida, joins a mainland on one side and is mostly surrounded by water?

Peninsula derives from the Latin words paene and insula, meaning almost and island.

Which painting by Leonardo da Vinci was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by a man who had worked there?

The Mona Lisa spent two years hidden in the apartment of Vincenzo Peruggia, who had helped build its glass case. He was caught in Florence after offering it to a gallery there.

Which symbol at the start of a music staff fixes the note G above middle C on the second line?

The treble clef is the most frequently seen form of the G-clef, so widely used that even the low saxophones read their music in it.

Which German educator coined the word kindergarten in 1840 for an institute he had founded for young children?

Friedrich Fröbel had founded his Play and Activity Institute three years earlier at Bad Blankenburg. His new word soon entered the English language as well.

Which physician and educator opened her first Children's House in 1907, launching a child-led teaching method?

Maria Montessori enrolled 50 or 60 children, aged from about two to seven, at the first house, known in Italian as the Casa dei Bambini.