1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off Read online

were distributed equally,

  each Finn would have 14% more space

  than Heathrow Airport’s shopping area.

  Human saliva

  contains a painkiller called opiorphin

  that is six times more powerful

  than morphine.

  The average American produces

  10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime:

  about the same amount of water as leaks

  from the average American home

  in a year.

  The platypus and the echidna

  are the only mammals

  that could make their own custard:

  they both lay eggs

  and produce milk.

  The Chupa Chups logo

  was designed by

  Salvador Dalí.

  4,000 McDonald’s hamburgers

  (as many as you could get from one cow)

  are eaten every minute.

  Every year,

  4 million cats

  are eaten in Asia.

  In 2011, Chinese billionaire Long Liyuan

  was murdered at a business lunch

  by means of poison in his

  slow-boiled

  cat-meat

  casserole.

  When eating jelly babies,

  nearly eight out of ten people

  bite off the heads first.

  More gold is recoverable

  from a tonne of personal computers

  than from 17 tonnes

  of gold ore.

  The gold dissolved in the world’s oceans

  is estimated to be worth $475 trillion:

  about 30 times

  the US public debt.

  In 1917, John D. Rockefeller

  could have paid off

  the whole US public debt on his own.

  Today, Bill Gates’s entire fortune

  would barely cover two months’ interest.

  Tyrannosaurus rex (65 million years ago)

  is closer in time to us than to

  Diplodocus (150 million years ago).

  There are about 6,900 languages

  in existence but more than

  half the world’s population

  uses only 20 of them.

  In English, the name of every number

  shares a letter with each neighbour.

  One shares an O with two, which shares a

  T with three, which shares an R with four,

  which shares an F with five, which shares

  an I with six – and so on indefinitely.

  Archimedes’ number myriakis-myriostas

  periodu myriakis-myriston

  arithmon myriai myriades

  is one followed by 80 quadrillion zeroes.

  In 2010, YouTube was watched

  700 billion times, but 99% of the views

  were of only 30% of the videos.

  In 1900, all the world’s mathematical

  knowledge could be written in about

  80 books; today it would fill

  more than 100,000.

  In 2005, the 54 billionaires in Britain

  paid only £14.7 million in income tax

  between them. Of this,

  £9 million came from

  James Dyson.

  In 2011, only nine of the 62 owners

  of apartments in One Hyde Park, London,

  the world’s most expensive block of flats,

  paid any council tax.

  Over 600,000 companies

  (including 25 with flats in One Hyde Park)

  are registered in the British Virgin Islands

  (population 28,882).

  In the first month of its life,

  a silkworm puts on

  10,000 times its birth weight.

  A female ferret

  will die

  if she doesn’t have sex for a year.

  A six-inch catfish has

  more than

  250,000 taste buds.

  A full Kindle

  weighs a billionth of a billionth

  of a gram

  more than a brand-new one.

  There are over 1,200 species

  of bat in the world

  and not one of them is blind.

  There are 4,800 species

  of frog in the world

  but only one of them goes ‘ribbit’.

  Eight times as many people belong to

  the National Trust

  as to the

  Conservative, Labour and

  Liberal Democrat parties

  combined.

  Every human being

  starts out life as an arsehole:

  it’s the first part of the body

  to form in the womb.

  51% of British women under 50

  have never been married:

  twice as many as in 1980.

  Kanye North and Kanye South

  (but not Kanye West)

  are parliamentary constituencies

  in Botswana.

  The animal rights group PETA

  claims that cows can suffer humiliation

  if people laugh at them.

  Wagamama

  is Japanese for ‘selfish’.

  In 2009, Exxon made $19 billion profit

  but received a $156 million

  federal tax rebate.

  Only 2% of women

  describe themselves

  as beautiful.

  In the 1950s,

  3-D films

  were known as

  ‘deepies’.

  Loch Ness

  is deep enough

  and long enough

  to contain the entire

  population of the world

  ten times over.

  40% of the electricity in Pakistan

  goes missing, half of it stolen:

  if there’s a power cut

  (which is often),

  they just steal the wires.

  In 2011, British trains were delayed

  by 16,000 hours because of people

  stealing metal parts from the railways.

  After Einstein died,

  his brain was pickled,

  sliced into 240 cubes and

  left in a box marked ‘Costa Cider’

  for 20 years.

  Sir Walter Raleigh’s devoted widow

  Elizabeth kept his decapitated head

  with her in a velvet bag

  for 29 years.

  Forflitten adj.

  Overwhelmed

  by unreasonable

  and out-of-proportion

  scolding.

  Forwallowed adj.

  Weary with being

  tossed about.

  Rhinorrhea n.

  The medical condition

  otherwise known as

  ‘a runny nose’.

  Subitise vb

  To perceive the number

  of objects in a group

  without actually

  counting them.

  An acrocomic is someone with long hair.

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary,

  the word hasn’t been used

  since it was coined in 1626.

  Until now, that is.

  The word ‘unfriend’

  first appeared in print in 1659.

  Berk and charlie (as in ‘a proper charlie’)

  are rhyming slang for

  ‘Berkshire Hunt’ and ‘Charlie Hunt’.

  The most popular beers

  in Turkmenistan are called

  ‘Berk’ and ‘Zip’.

  As a reward

  for winning the part of Harry Potter,

  the 11-year-old Daniel Radcliffe

  was allowed to stay up

  and watch Fawlty Towers.

  Durham University

  offers a Harry Potter module.

  It includes the topic

  ‘Gryffindor and Slytherin:

  prejudice and intolerance in the classroom’.
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  The word ‘school’

  comes from the ancient Greek for

  ‘free time’.

  In particle physics, a ‘barn’ is an area

  that covers a billionth of the cross-section

  of a silk fibre. It’s called a barn because

  (in subatomic terms) it’s so huge.

  In 2010, twice as many Britons died

  in accidents in their own homes

  as in traffic accidents.

  The names Honda and Toyota

  derive from Japanese words for

  different kinds of rice field.

  In French, Hungarian, Spanish,

  Irish, Italian, Portuguese,

  Latvian, Serbian, Croatian,

  Bosnian, Montenegrin and Tagalog,

  the words for ‘time’ and ‘weather’

  are the same.

  Britain

  is the windiest country

  in Europe.

  The Inuit use the same word,

  sila, to mean both

  ‘weather’ and ‘consciousness’.

  There are five categories of hurricane.

  The slowest outpaces a cheetah;

  the fastest beats the world’s

  fastest roller coaster

  (149 mph).

  There are at least 300

  earthquakes a year in the UK,

  but only 11 people have ever died in one.

  There is no known scientific way

  of predicting earthquakes.

  The most reliable method is

  to count the number of missing cats

  in the local paper: if it trebles,

  an earthquake is imminent.

  The amount of water on Earth is constant,

  and continually recycled over time:

  some of the water you drink

  will have passed through

  a dinosaur.

  95% of the lead

  in British army bullets

  comes from recycled materials.

  A squishop

  is a squire

  who is also a bishop.

  Muammar

  is Arabic for ‘long-lived’.

  A newborn giant panda weighs

  less than a cup of tea.

  The CIA reads

  up to 5 million tweets a day.

  85% of the clicking on web ads

  is done by 8% of the people.

  Since 2008,

  the number of clicks has halved.

  The 6-trillionth, 8-trillionth,

  9-trillionth and 10-trillionth

  digits of pi

  are all fives.

  Under Chairman Mao,

  every Chinese family

  was obliged to kill a sparrow a week

  to stop them eating all the rice.

  The project was ineffective because

  sparrows don’t eat rice.

  Barley

  has twice as many genes as

  people.

  Scotland

  has twice as many giant pandas as

  Conservative MPs.

  Statistically speaking,

  the Vatican has two popes

  per square kilometre.

  Sending a man to the Moon

  and finding Osama Bin Laden

  cost the US government

  about the same amount of time and money:

  ten years and $100 billion.

  IMAX projectors weigh as much as hippos.

  Their bulbs cost $5 million each

  and are bright enough to be seen

  from the International Space Station.

  The International Space Station

  has cost more than 30 times

  its own weight in gold.

  In 2005,

  Americans spent 6 billion hours

  filling in tax forms,

  at an estimated cost of $265 billion.

  Between 1948 and 1998,

  20,362 Israelis were killed in wars

  and 20,852 were killed on the roads.

  The American TV sex therapist

  Dr Ruth Westheimer

  trained as an Israeli sniper.

  Snipur

  is Icelandic for ‘clitoris’.

  Taking cocaine

  increases the chance

  of having a heart attack

  within the hour

  by 2,400%.

  Oystercatchers

  don’t catch oysters.

  Cows carry cowpox

  but chickens

  don’t carry chickenpox.

  Cocks don’t have cocks.

  In 97% of bird species,

  the males don’t have penises.

  The rooster on the Corn Flakes box

  is called Cornelius.

  They chose a rooster

  because the word ceiliog,

  Welsh for cockerel,

  sounds a bit like Kellogg.

  Welsh

  has no single words for

  ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

  Russian

  has no word for

  ‘bigot’.

  French

  has no word for

  ‘awkward’.

  Latin

  has no word for

  ‘interesting’.

  Uranium

  is 40 times more common

  than silver

  and 500 times more common

  than gold.

  In Spanish,

  the word esposas

  means both

  ‘wives’ and ‘handcuffs’.

  Boghandler

  is Danish for

  ‘bookseller’.

  Serbia

  is the world’s leading exporter

  of raspberries.

  In 1956,

  there were only 12 cars

  on Ibiza.

  About half a million mice

  live in the London Underground.

  The Companies Act (2006)

  is the longest act in history;

  it is so complex that

  most British companies

  unwittingly break the law

  six times a day.

  Per head of population,

  Britain has 13 times

  as many accountants

  as Germany.

  The average pencil can write

  45,000 words,

  or a single line 35 miles long.

  Venus rotates so slowly on its axis

  that its day is longer than its year.

  Until the 1960s,

  the only reliable pregnancy test

  was to inject a woman’s urine

  into a female African clawed frog.

  If the woman was pregnant,

  the frog would ovulate within 12 hours.

  Chemotherapy

  is a by-product of the mustard gas

  used in the First World War.

  The year after

  the American Civil War ended,

  a fifth of Mississippi’s state budget

  was spent on artificial limbs

  for wounded soldiers.

  More than 90%

  of all the blackcurrants

  grown in Britain

  go into Ribena.

  Nutmeg is illegal in Saudi Arabia

  because it is hallucinogenic

  if consumed in large quantities.

  Mushrooms

  are more closely related to humans

  than to plants.

  The first holiday

  organised by Thomas Cook

  was a temperance outing

  in the East Midlands.

  Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo

  all mean ‘capital’

  in their respective languages.

  Athens is the only capital city in Europe

  where the air is more polluted

  outside than inside.

  Skoda

  is Czech for

  ‘shame’, ‘damage’ or ‘pity’.

  At least 109 journeys
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  between adjacent London Tube stations

  are quicker to walk.