Facts Of The Day

All Facts Of The Day are from Uncle John's Did You Know...? Bathroom Reader For Kids Only.

Subject: Man-Made Milestones

May 27, 2007
Fact #1:
Hard hats were invented and first used in the building of the Hoover Dam in 1933.

May 28, 2007
Fact #2:
The sandals that the Statue of Liberty is wearing are size 879. (They're about 25 feet long.)

May 29, 2007
Fact #3:
The Great Wall of China stretches 1,500 miles and contains almost a billion bricks.

May 30, 2007
Fact #4:
On a clear day, you can see four states from the top of Chicago's Sears Tower: Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

May 31, 2007
Fact #5:
The Eiffel Tower is repainted every seven years. It takes 60 tons of brown paint to do the job.

June 1, 2007
Fact #6:
There's evidence that after the Pilgrim ship Mayflower sailed from England to America (and back), it was taken apart and made into a barn in England.

June 2, 2007
Fact #7:
What kind of stone is Mount Rushmore made of? Granite. It was "carved" mosttly with dynamite.

June 3, 2007
Fact #8:
Egypt's Great Sphinx is 260 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 65 feet tall, making it the largest stone statue in the world.

June 4, 2007
Fact #9:
While the rest of the world had wheels, the Aztecs had no knowledge of them.

Subject: English

June 5, 2007
Fact #10:
There are only three words in English that use "en" to pluralize them: ox (oxen), brother (brethren), and child (children).

June 6, 2007
Fact #11:
While many Western languages, such as Spanish, Italian, and French, are Latin-based, English isn't - it's mostly derived from German.

June 7, 2007
Fact #12:
There are 812 three-letter words in current usage in the English language, and 857 fifteen-letter words.

June 8, 2007
Fact #13:
The Brooklyn accent - saying "dese, dem, and dose" for "these, them and those" - came from the Dutch accent of the original settlers. Want to hear a Brooklyn accent? Listen to Bugs Bunny.

June 9, 2007
Fact #14:
In 1737 Benjamin Franklin made a list of American slang terms for drunkenness - and came up with 228 of them.

June 10, 2007
Fact #15:
"Pants" was a dirty word in England in the 1880s.

June 11, 2007
Fact #16:
"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

June 12, 2007
Fact #17:
The North American National Scrabble Association recognizes five words with 392 points - the most anyone can score in a single turn: OXAZEPAM, BEZIQUES, CAZIQUES, MEZQUITS, and MEZQUITE.

Subject: All About Earth

June 13, 2007
Fact #18:
Lake Baikal in Russia is the world's deepest lake - it's deep enough for five Empire State Buildings to stand in it on top of each other.

June 14, 2007
Fact #19:
Millions of years ago, the Earth consisted of one land mass surrounded by a vast ocean. Geologists call the land Pangaea (Greek for "all land"); they call the ocean Panthalassa ("all sea").

June 15, 2007
Fact #20:

Sometime between 180 and 200 million years ago, Pangaea broke into two parts: Laurasia, which consisted of what is now North America, Europe, and part of Asia; and Gondwanaland - what's now South America, Africa, Australia, India, and Antarctica.

June 16, 2007
Fact #21:
Where's the Earth's core? Directly under your feet, 4,000 miles down.

June 17, 2007
Fact #22:
Tallest mountain on Earth: Not Mt. Everest - it's Hawaii's Mauna Kea, which rises 33,476 feet from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

June 18, 2007
Fact #23:
Want to travel as fast as a jet plane while standing still? Stand on the equator. The Earth's spin is greatest there, moving you at more than 1,000 miles per hour.

June 19, 2007
Fact #24:
What do you call the tip of a glacier? The snout.

June 20, 2007
Fact #25:
The way at which the Earth is tipped on its axis - at an angle of 23½° - is what causes the seasons.