There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.
• Nearly half the population of Alaska live in one city, Anchorage.
• The Ainu are the aboriginal people of Japan.
• The women of the Tiwi tribe in the South Pacific are married at birth.
• The bulk of the island of Tenerife is the volcanic mountain, Mount Teide.
• The Canary Islands were once known as Blessed or Fortunate Isles.
• Mount Aso, in Japan, is the world’s largest volcanic crater.
• Approximately one quarter of the world’s population is Chinese.
• Denmark has the oldest flag in the world.
• China has the most borders with other countries.
• Polish people use zloty (‘golden’) as currency.
• The Romany people were wrongly thought to have come from Egypt, earning them the nickname ‘gypsies’.
• Zaire was formerly known as the Belgian Congo.
• Nicaragua is the largest and most sparsely populated state in Central America.
• Colombia’s largest export is cocaine.
• ‘Himalayas’ means ‘abode of snow’.
• The Karakoram mountain range is known as the ‘roof of the world’.
• Venice consists of 118 islands linked by 400 bridges.
• France is sometimes called the ‘Hexagon’ because it is roughly six-sided.
• Socrates taught Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle.
• Prime Minister William Gladstone’s middle name was Ewart.
• Ronald Reagan was a sports commentator before becoming a Hollywood actor.
• Reagan once advertised Chesterfield cigarettes.
• Four American presidents were assassinated while in office: Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield and Kennedy.
• Linus Pauling is the only man ever to win two individual Nobel prizes; one for peace, the other for chemistry.
• In the 1969 Sydney to Hobart race, British Prime Minister Edward Heath captained the winning team in the yacht Morning Cloud.
• President Lincoln’s advisor during the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, was born a slave.
• American astronaut John Glenn became a US senator in 1974 but was unsuccessful in his bid to become a Democratic presidential candidate.
• John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president of the United States.
• Robin Hood became a titled gentleman called the Earl of Huntingdon.
• A fellow prison inmate killed the American serial sex murderer Jeffrey Dahmer in 1994.
• JFK is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.
• Nathuran Godse assassinated Gandhi in 1948.
• Malcolm X’s daughter, Qubilah Bahiyah Shabazz, was charged with allegedly hiring a hitman to kill the leader of Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan.
• When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon in 1969, Michael Collins was left behind in the command module.
• John F. Kennedy represented Massachusetts as senator.
• Stella Rimington was the first woman to head MI5.
• Ronald Reagan’s Scottish terriers were called Scotch and Soda.
• The Tibetan mountain people use yak’s milk as their form of currency.
• Spain literally means ‘the land of rabbits’.
• Little pools of unfrozen water can sometimes be found underneath the great icy plains of the Antarctic.
• Ten per cent of the salt mined in the world each year is used to de-ice the roads in the USA.
• The Spanish Inquisition once condemned the entire Netherlands to death for heresy.
• The River Nile has frozen over only twice in living memory – once in the 9th century and again in the 11th century.
• The Angel Falls in Venezuela are nearly twenty times taller than Niagara Falls.
• Dirty snow melts more quickly than clean snow.
• The Scandinavian capital, Stockholm, is built on nine islands connected by bridges.
• The Forth railway bridge in Scotland is a metre (33in) longer in summer than in winter, due to thermal expansion.
• In the Andes, time is often measured by how long it takes to smoke a cigarette.
• Until the 18th century, India produced almost all the world’s diamonds.
• The Earth’s magnetic field is not permanent.
• On 30 March 1867, Alaska was officially purchased from Russia for about 2 cents an acre. At the time, many politicians believed this purchase of ‘wasteland to be a costly folly’.
• During winter, the skating rinks in Moscow cover more than 2,690,980ft2 (250,000m2) of land.
• As the Pacific plate moves under its coast, the North Island of New Zealand is getting larger.
• Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.
• If you travel from east to west across the Soviet Union, you will cross seven time zones.
• Sahara means ‘desert’ in Arabic.
• On 15 January 1867, there was a severe frost in London, and over forty people died in Regent’s Park when the ice broke on the main lake and they fell into the freezing waters.
• The water in the Dead Sea is so salty that it is far easier to float than to drown in it.
• The state flag of Alaska was designed by a 13-year-old boy.
• Lightning strikes the Earth about 200 times a second.
• Very hard rain would pour down at the rate of about 20mph (32km/h).
• Discounting Australia, which is generally regarded as a continental land mass, the world’s largest island is Greenland.
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