Sunday, February 27, 2011

All about Earth !!


Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms every day.

At one time the earth consisted of one land mass and a huge body of water. Geologists today call the land Pangaea (from the Greek words "all land" while the water was called Panthalassa (from the Greek words "all sea"). Between 180 and 200 million years ago, Pangaea split into two parts: Laurasia, which consisted of North America, Europe and Asia; and Gondwanaland, which consisted of Africa, South America, India, Antarctica and Australia.

Astronauts brought back about 800 pounds of lunar rock to Earth. Most of it has not been analyzed.

Approximately 40,000 tons of meteoric dust hits the Earth each year.

According to Hawaiian lore, the earth mother Papa mated with the sky father Wake to give birth to the Hawaiian Islands.

About one-tenth of the earth's surface is permanently covered with ice.

A Red Giant(a kind of exploded star) has a lower density than any vacuum here on earth.

A Blue Earth, Minnesota, law declares that no child under the age of twelve may talk over the telephone unless monitored by a parent.

You would need to travel at 6.95 miles per second to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull. This is equivalent to traveling from New York to Philadelphia in about twenty seconds.

Venus rotates so slowly that in a typical day lasts approximately 244 Earth days (5,856 hours).

If you dig in your backyard, don’t worry about running into the earth’s core. You’d have to dig a hole 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) deep!

Some scientists believe that the earth began billions of years ago as a huge ball of swirling dust and gases.

Read more: All about Earth

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Interesting Language Facts !!


According to Illinois state law, it is illegal to speak English. The officially recognized language is "American."

Widow is the only female form in the English language that is shorter than its corresponding male term (widower).

Victor Hugo's Les Miserable contains one of the longest sentences in the French language 823 words without a period.

There is only ONE word in the English language with THREE CONSECUTIVE SETS OF DOUBLE LETTERS.... Bookkeeper

There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times: "indivisibility."

There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."

There are thirteen languages spoken by more than 100 million people. They are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French, Japanese, German, and Urdu.

There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. The most widely spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. There are 885,000,000 people in China that speak that language.

There are only two sequences of four consecutive letters that can be found in the English language: "rstu" and "mnop." Examples of each are understudy and gynophobia.

There are only 4 words in the English language which end in "duos": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

There are at least two words in the English language that use all of the vowels, in the correct order, and end in the letter Y: abstemiously & facetiously.

There are 41,806 different spoken languages in the world today.

The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.

The word "honcho" comes from a Japanese word meaning "squad leader" and first came into usage in the English language during the American occupation of Japan following World War II.

source: Interesting Language Facts