Fast Facts
October 26, 2007
A lion’s roar can be heard from five miles away.
Twenty-eight percent of Africa is wilderness.
The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
There are only four words in the English language that end in “”-dous”” : tremendous, horrendous, stupendous and hazardous.
Ninety percent of all volcanic activity on Earth occurs in the oceans.
Author Gore Vidal is a distant cousin of Al Gore.
Antarctica has as much ice as the Atlantic Ocean has water.
It is illegal in Alaska to give a moose an alcoholic drink.
Tasmania has the cleanest air in the inhabited world.
It’s difficult for a giraffe to lower its head to drink from a river or lake, so it gets much of its needed moisture from eating tree leaves.
Cleopatra believed that eating pickles enhanced her beauty.
The largest hurricane known to man isn’t on Earth; it’s Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a huge storm three times Earth’s size that has been raging on the planet’s surface for centuries.
A mountain’s temperature drops 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit for every 500 feet up.
The phrase “”the real McCoy”” was originated by a 19th-century advertisement for a McCoy sewing machine.
Antarctica is the only continent where a tornado has never been recorded.
The Japanese word judo means “”the gentle way.””
When he died in 1982, “”Dragnet”” star Jack Webb became the first civilian in Los Angeles to be buried with full police honors. His badge number, 714, was also retired.
