About This Quiz
Everyone likes to think of themselves as knowing a good amount of stuff. We're all great at dinner parties, after all, with our sparkling anecdotes, hilarious jokes and endless but never excessively wielded string of arcane and intriguing truths. Who hasn't dazzled a potential love interest by rattling off some fascinating fact about how deep space isn't actually empty after all, knowing what's really lurking at the bottom of the ocean, or being able to tell them the precise amount of rat feces that's legally permitted by state and federal authorities to be in that dish they're in the middle of eating (don't Google this if you intend to ever eat happily again)? Who hasn't appealed to a potential employer by knowing the history of their industry, a useful tidbit about their favorite sporting hobby,or a handy hint about the particular tipple they prefer at the end of a working day? Who has not silenced their boring or controversial relatives by artfully diverting a conversation about who exactly is coming where and doing what to whose job by pulling out an obscure observation about the shedding habits of grass snakes or the local history of the neighborhood?
If you haven't recently enjoyed such an opportunity, now is your chance! Let's get started.
Mali is a West African country and former imperial power whose capital, Bamako, is the fastest-growing city in Africa. It is on the Niger River.
Cheetahs have been clocked at short distances going over 70 mph, making them the fastest land animal.
There are 27 Amendments, though only 26 are in force as the 21st repealed the 18th (the one that prohibited alcohol).
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The House of Bernadotte has held the Swedish throne since 1818.
Sometimes a group of bears is called a sloth. This may be because of the sloth bear. It would be much cooler if it were a Goldilocks though!
It's a curious feature of how folding works that eventually the paper will get too fat along the fold to successfully fold again.
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Pennies were indeed worth more melted down than they were as pennies. People have often argued that pennies are so hefty that they actually slow down the financial system.
If you put light through an ultracold atomic gas, it goes much slower than you might expect. "Light speed" is the measure of how fast it goes in a vacuum.
The thagomizer was named by cartoonist Gary Larson in a 1980s cartoon from his popular "Far Side" series.
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The Python features are Life of Brian, Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life. Otherwise Python are primarily known for their sketch show and songs.
Pollyanna lived on HMS Trident for six weeks after Russians gave it to the Brits!
Giethoorn is unusual for having no roads at all. Even Venice has a few of them, but Giethoorn is all canals!
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The water is tainted by iron oxide, and it really is bright red. It's a beautiful and chilling sight.
All four answers were "real" satirical candidates who stood in the British elections - which tend to attract a lot of such people as just about anyone can enter for a few hundred pounds. Lord Buckethead has been a couple of different people, however, and thus has a certain longevity. He has stood against three Tory Prime Ministers. British elections require all candidates to stand in a row while results are read, and then shake hands, meaning the serious candidates have to stand on camera next to the silly ones and pretend not to feel undermined.
Roy C. Sullivan simply kept getting hit by lightning and eventually was so distressed by it that he shot himself.
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Harry Houdini was a from a Jewish Polish background. His real name was Eric Weiss, but he changed it to honor his hero Robert Houdin and also to sound less ethnically distinct.
You knew this had to be a trick, didn't you? Samuel German named the cake for himself but now, of course, everyone thinks it's German as in the nationality.
The letter J does not exist in the Roman alphabet, as you can see from the way they spelled eg Julius Caesar or Jesus as Iulius or Iesus.
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Apparently the Royal Family abolished Monopoly from family gatherings as they are too competitive. It is well known that they love charades though.
Myotonic goats get a temporary paralysis when they are very shocked, and fall down and die. It's not clear why evolution favored this particular adaptation.
The swimming pigs live on a reef sometimes that can get wet when the tide comes in - so they just swim until the water goes out again! They are left over from a shipwreck a couple hundred years ago.
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These two voice artists played Mickey and Minnie and then fell in love and married. One imagines their vows sounded very creative indeed.
The mammoth's skull has a hole located in such a way as to seem like there is one big eye in the middle
So many munitions were fired on this beach that 4% of its "sand" is actually crushed-up shrapnel.
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The whole village is decorated with flower murals, which attract many tourists.
Otters use little rocks for opening clams and other shelled creatures - but since you can't always find a rock, they carry them around if they find a good one.
Elizabeth Jennings Graham heroically refused to leave the streetcar (as required by then existing law) 100 years before the Civil Rights movement really kicked off, and the result was desegregation of streetcars. Sadly wider society did not learn their lesson, meaning Rosa Parks had to do the same thing 100 years later.
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Yep - it was a really boring day, apparently, as the reporters informed the viewers, ""There is no news." As they said this: Hitler was rising to power, the stock market was in a shambles as world trade collapsed following the Wall Street Crash, the Dust Bowl was kicking off across half of the USA, and Mahatma Gandhi had recently started marching across India. None of these things apparently rated coverage, though!
This makes Miami one of very few cities founded by women and the only major US one. Tuttle persuaded Henry Flagler, a railroad tycoon, to build the railway down to Miami and incorporated the city with its mighty population of 300. It is now the most important port in the southeastern USA.
Kellogg was a religious zealot who thought that eating anything too nice or delicious would surely induce naughty behavior, and invented corn flakes to be so boring that nobody would be provoked into such lustfulness. It seems abundantly clear that it didn't work.
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The Curiosity Rover sings Happy Birthday to itself, every year on August 5, the anniversary of its arrival on Mars. As the Mars year is longer than the Earth year (and the Mars day is 40 minutes longer), it is technically getting further and further out of sync with the Martian year.
Famous paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) was a great British scientist whose exploration of Jurassic marine fossil beds in Dorset added greatly to our understanding of the dinosaurs!
They really are called pufflings and they are every bit as cute as the name implies.
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This still represents more than 2/3 of the freshwater on the planet.
A supernova is a collapsed star. A pulsar is a star with a very regular light signature. A black hole is (usually) a massive star that collapsed a very long time ago (though sometimes they may be as old as the universe or galaxy). A quasar, however, just looks like a star through a telescope due to all the light it gives off, but it's actually a supermassive black hole plus a disk of gas, and not a star at all.