49 Fun Facts About Tricky

What is the capital city of Australia?

Canberra: the constitution put the capital in New South Wales but at least 100 miles from Sydney, so a new city was built, and Parliament sat in Melbourne until it moved there in 1927.

Which African country has more ancient pyramids than Egypt?

Sudan: the kings of Kush, who ruled Egypt for a time as its 25th Dynasty, took up pyramid building at home, and their kingdom went on to raise more than 200 smaller, steeper tombs along the Nile.

How well does NASA say the naked eye can see the Great Wall from orbit?

Barely, and only in near-perfect conditions: the wall is built of local materials that match the land around it, and Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, reported that he could not see it.

Where does the image of Vikings wearing horned helmets mostly come from?

19th-century opera costumes: designer Carl Emil Doepler put horns on the helmets when Wagner's Ring cycle was staged in the 1870s, and the look stuck, though no horned helmet from the Viking Age has ever been dug up.

Botanically speaking, the peanut is what kind of plant?

A legume, in the same family as peas and beans: once a peanut flower is fertilised, a stalk called a peg grows down into the soil, and the pod ripens underground.

Which of these fruits is a berry in the strict botanical sense?

Banana: to a botanist a berry is a fleshy fruit grown from the single ovary of one flower, so bananas, grapes and tomatoes qualify, while strawberries and raspberries are clusters of many tiny fruits.

In 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled that, for tariff purposes, the tomato is what?

A vegetable: the justices agreed that a tomato is botanically a fruit, but held that the tariff law spoke as ordinary people do, and people serve tomatoes with the main course, not as dessert.

Experiments show that a goldfish's memory is best measured in what?

Months: goldfish fed at one side of a tank learn to wait there at mealtimes, and those taught a task can still repeat it months later, so the famous three-second memory is a myth.

Which of these is the largest desert on Earth?

Antarctica: a desert is defined by how little rain or snow falls, not by heat, and the frozen continent gets so little that it counts as one, about half as large again as the Sahara.

How did Albert Einstein actually perform in mathematics as a schoolboy?

He excelled well beyond his age: by his own account Einstein had mastered calculus before he was fifteen, and he laughed when shown a 1935 Ripley's column claiming he had failed maths.

In Mary Shelley's novel, who or what is Frankenstein?

The scientist: Victor Frankenstein is the university student who makes the creature, and in the novel that creature is no grunting brute but an eloquent giant who teaches himself to read Paradise Lost.

Strictly speaking, what is Big Ben?

The great bell: the tower that houses it has a name of its own, and since 2012 that has been the Elizabeth Tower, chosen by MPs to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.

What colour is an aircraft's 'black box' flight recorder?

Bright orange: the colour is there so that searchers can spot the recorder in wreckage, and for crashes at sea each unit also carries a beacon that signals from underwater.

In which country was the board game Chinese checkers invented?

Germany: the game came out there in 1892 as Stern-Halma, named for its star-shaped board, and only became 'Chinese checkers' in 1928, when a version was sold under that name in America.

In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the name for a Danish pastry translates as what?

Viennese bread: the Scandinavian name, wienerbrød, points back to Vienna, while Austrians return the compliment and call the same pastry a Kopenhagener, after Copenhagen.

Fortune cookies, a US Chinese-restaurant staple, most likely came from immigrants from where?

Japan: a very similar folded cracker was being baked around Kyoto in the 1800s, and a Japanese gardener in San Francisco is said to have served the first American ones in the early 1900s.

The koala is often called a bear, but it is actually what kind of animal?

A marsupial: the newborn finishes growing in its mother's pouch, and adults doze for most of the day because the toxic eucalyptus leaves they live on give so little energy.

The orca, or killer whale, is the largest member of which family?

Oceanic dolphins: the orca is a toothed whale and the biggest member of the dolphin family, which also takes in the pilot whales despite their name.

Which planet has the hottest surface in the solar system?

Venus: its thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, keeping the surface above 460 °C, hotter even than Mercury, which orbits far closer to the Sun.

What does a camel actually store in its hump?

Fat: the hump is a food reserve, not a water tank, and when a camel goes a long time without eating it burns through the store until the hump sags and flops to one side.

Which Scarlett Johansson film is built on the myth that people use only 10% of their brains?

Lucy: its poster claimed the average person uses 10% of their brain capacity, but neurologists say we use virtually every part of the brain, and most of it is active almost all the time.

What is the actual risk from the poinsettia, the red-leaved Christmas plant, to children and pets?

Essentially none: the plant's milky sap can irritate the mouth or upset the stomach, but poison experts say eating it has little if any effect beyond that, and it is not fatal.

The myth of lemming mass suicide was cemented by staged footage in a 1958 documentary from which studio?

Walt Disney: for White Wilderness the crew set a small group of lemmings running on a turntable to fake a migration, then shoved them off a cliff to stage the plunge into the sea.

Legend wrongly credits Thomas Crapper with inventing what?

The flush toilet: Crapper ran a London plumbing firm and took out nine patents, but none was for the toilet itself, and a flushing mechanism had been patented in 1775, decades before he was born.

Which work is the earliest known source of 'let them eat cake', usually pinned on Marie Antoinette?

Rousseau's Confessions, written in the 1760s when Marie Antoinette was still a child, gives the line to an unnamed 'great princess', and what she tells the hungry poor to eat is brioche.

What did educated Europeans in Columbus's time generally believe about the shape of the Earth?

That it was a sphere: the real quarrel with Columbus was over the globe's size, which he badly underestimated, and the flat-Earth tale was spread centuries later by Washington Irving's 1828 biography of him.

How were the nineteen people executed as witches at Salem in 1692 put to death?

Hanged: all nineteen died on the gallows and nobody was burned, though one more man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death under heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea.

Which US president is the only one to have spoken English as a second language?

Martin Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch in Kinderhook, New York, and learned English at school, yet he was also the first president born a US citizen and not a British subject.

Bombay duck, a pungent dried delicacy of Anglo-Indian cooking, is what?

A fish: the bummalo, a lizardfish caught off Mumbai, is dried in the sun until pungent, then fried and crumbled over a meal as a condiment.

Guinea pigs, which are not pigs at all, were first domesticated where?

The Andes of South America: people there bred guinea pigs for meat long before Europeans made pets of them, and households in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia still raise them for the table.

The digits 0 to 9, often called Arabic numerals, were invented where?

India: Europe learned the system from the Arabic writings of mathematicians such as al-Khwarizmi, so Europeans named the digits after their teachers and not their inventors.

Which African bird, once thought to come from Turkey, did the English call a turkey before the American one?

The guineafowl was England's turkey-cock by the 1540s, and the name soon passed to the American bird, probably because the two were confused; the turkey's Latin name, Meleagris, is an ancient word for guineafowl.

The Hundred Years' War, which really lasted 116 years, was fought between England and which kingdom?

France: historians date the war from 1337 to 1453, but it was a stop-start run of separate conflicts broken by long truces, and its tidy name was only given to it by later historians.

In which month of the modern Gregorian calendar did Russia's October Revolution take place?

November: Russia still ran on the Julian calendar, which had fallen 13 days behind the Gregorian one used in the West, so its 25 October was 7 November there.

What did Abner Doubleday, wrongly named baseball's inventor years after his death, actually do for a living?

Army officer: Doubleday commanded the gunners who fired the Union's first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, and he went on to fight at Gettysburg as a general.

Catgut, once used for violin strings, is usually made from the intestines of which animals?

Sheep and goats: their gut is twisted and dried into cord, and cats never came into it, because the name is perhaps a slip for 'kitgut', from kit, an old word for a small fiddle.

Which ingredient of milk and dark chocolate is left out of white chocolate?

Cocoa solids: white chocolate keeps the pale cocoa butter pressed from the bean but leaves out the dark part of the cocoa, which is why it stays ivory and never turns brown.

Why is a bullfighter's muleta red?

Tradition, and to hide bloodstains: bulls are colour-blind to red and charge the matador's other cape, which is magenta, just as hard, because it is the movement that provokes them.

What is the most common reason a chameleon changes colour?

Social signalling and temperature: a chameleon usually shifts colour to stand out, brightening to court a mate or face down a rival, and it darkens when cold because dark skin soaks up more heat.

What colour is deoxygenated blood inside your veins?

Dark red: human blood darkens as it gives up oxygen but stays red, while some crustaceans really are blue-blooded, thanks to a copper-based pigment that turns blue when it carries oxygen.

Which effect is wrongly said to make sinks drain opposite ways in each hemisphere?

The Coriolis effect really does set cyclones turning opposite ways in the two hemispheres, but over a sink it is far too weak, and stray motion in the water decides which way it drains.

Measured from base to peak rather than from sea level, which mountain is Earth's tallest?

Mauna Kea: the Hawaiian volcano stands only about 4,200 m above the sea, but it rises from the floor of the Pacific, and from base to peak it outstrips Everest's height above sea level.

Which mountain's summit is the farthest point on Earth's surface from the centre of the Earth?

Chimborazo: Earth bulges at the equator and this Ecuadorian volcano stands just one degree south of it, so its summit lies about two kilometres farther from Earth's centre than Everest's.

Which is the most densely populated country in the world?

Monaco: about 38,000 people share roughly two square kilometres of the Riviera, so the principality makes room by building out into the sea, most recently with a new district opened in 2024.

Which is the only country in the world with a population under 1,000?

Vatican City: fewer than a thousand people live in the tiny enclave inside Rome, which Italy recognised as a sovereign state in 1929 so that the pope could act independently of any government.

What was Cleopatra's first language?

Koine Greek: her dynasty descended from Ptolemy, a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great, and in nearly three centuries on the throne she was the only one of the line to learn Egyptian.

In which country did German chocolate cake originate?

United States: the cake is named for Samuel German, who created a sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's company in the 1850s, and it took off in 1957 when a Texas homemaker's recipe ran in a Dallas newspaper.

Contrary to the schoolroom 'tongue map', what does research show about the tongue?

Every region can sense every taste: the map grew out of a 1942 Harvard chart of a 1901 German study, in which areas found to be slightly less sensitive were misread as having no sensitivity at all.

Chop suey, often called an American invention, takes its name from a phrase in which Chinese language?

Cantonese: tsap seui means 'odds and ends', and the dish has been traced to Guangdong, the southern province that many of the first Chinese immigrants to America had left.