100 Fun Facts About Eighth Grade

In what city was the U.S. Constitution written and signed in 1787?

Philadelphia hosted the Constitutional Convention at Independence Hall from May to September 1787; the national capital of Washington, D.C. did not yet exist.

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution opens with which words?

We the People was first followed by a list of all thirteen states; in the convention's final days Gouverneur Morris's committee changed it to 'of the United States'.

The 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992 about 200 years after it was proposed, delays pay rises for whom?

Members of Congress must wait until after the next House election for any pay change to take effect; a Texas student revived the forgotten 1789 proposal in 1982 after his paper on it earned a C.

What is the collective name for the first ten amendments to the Constitution?

The Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791; James Madison drafted the amendments and steered them through the House in 1789.

Which amendment protects freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly and petition?

The First Amendment was third on the list sent to the states in 1789; it moved to the top only because the two ahead of it failed to win ratification.

The Fourth Amendment protects people against what?

The Fourth Amendment bars unreasonable searches and seizures: police generally need a warrant based on probable cause, a rule born of British searches of colonial homes.

Which king does the Declaration of Independence accuse of 'repeated injuries and usurpations'?

George III is the 'He' who opens most of the Declaration's charges, from taxing without consent to quartering troops; he reigned until 1820, decades after losing the colonies.

Who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence?

Thomas Jefferson's draft was edited by Franklin and Adams and then cut by the full assembly, which struck out his long passage blaming the British crown for the slave trade.

Per the Declaration of Independence, people have the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of what?

Happiness stands where John Locke had 'estate': he wrote of 'life, liberty and estate' in 1689, and historians still debate whether the Declaration was reworking his line.

Where was the first fighting of the American Revolutionary War, in April 1775?

The fighting at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 opened the war; Paul Revere's ride the night before warned that British troops were marching from Boston.

Which 1781 siege was the decisive final victory of the Revolutionary War?

Cornwallis surrendered his army at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, after de Grasse's fleet blocked escape by sea; Britain then opened peace talks.

Which country signed a Treaty of Alliance with the American revolutionaries in 1778?

France agreed to the alliance once news of the British surrender at Saratoga reached its foreign minister; Benjamin Franklin signed for the Americans on February 6, 1778.

Which 1783 peace agreement ended the Revolutionary War and recognised American independence?

The Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783, with Britain recognising American independence and ceding land west to the Mississippi; another Treaty of Paris in 1898 ended the Spanish-American War.

The tea dumped into Boston Harbor in December 1773 belonged to which company?

The East India Company was sitting on unsold tea, so Parliament's Tea Act let it ship the surplus to America free of its usual duty, while colonists still paid the tax on landing.

Which port city did the United States originally try to buy before the Louisiana Purchase?

New Orleans controlled the mouth of the Mississippi, the outlet for western farmers' goods; American envoys went to buy the city and were offered the whole territory instead.

Roughly how much did the United States pay for the Louisiana Purchase?

$15 million bought some 828,000 square miles and about doubled the country's size; the American envoys had been cleared to spend only $10 million, and on far less land.

Which river did Lewis and Clark follow to reach the ocean in November 1805?

The Corps of Discovery canoed down the Columbia River and sighted the ocean in November 1805, wintering at Fort Clatsop near its mouth before turning home.

The Lewis and Clark journals record their interpreter Sacagawea as born into which nation?

Shoshone by the explorers' account: seized by Hidatsa raiders as a girl, she was reunited with her people when the expedition reached them, and they supplied horses for crossing the Rockies.

Which building did the British burn in August 1814 during the War of 1812?

The White House burned on August 24, 1814, hours after American militia were routed at Bladensburg; staff got Stuart's portrait of Washington out first, a rescue long credited to Dolley Madison.

Francis Scott Key wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner' after watching the bombardment of which fort in 1814?

Key watched the British bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbour on September 13–14, 1814; his poem, set to an English club tune, became the official anthem in 1931.

Which secretary of state largely wrote the 1823 Monroe Doctrine?

John Quincy Adams wrote most of it and argued President Monroe out of Britain's offer of a joint statement, so the warning to Europe went out in America's name alone.

Which president signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that led to the Trail of Tears?

Andrew Jackson signed the act on May 28, 1830; the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw were then forced west of the Mississippi, and thousands died on the journey.

What was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, founded in 1607?

Jamestown was founded on May 14, 1607 by the Virginia Company; most settlers died in the 'Starving Time' winter of 1609–10, yet the colony survived and served as Virginia's capital until 1699.

Which crop, introduced by John Rolfe, made the Virginia colony profitable?

Tobacco grown from a sweeter Caribbean strain became Virginia's cash crop; Rolfe also married Pocahontas in 1614, bringing a few years of peace with the Powhatan.

The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was the first governing document of which colony?

Plymouth's settlers drew it up because storms had landed them outside Virginia's jurisdiction and some passengers said no one could command them there; 41 men signed on November 11, 1620.

Where did the American Civil War begin in April 1861?

Confederate guns opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour on April 12, 1861; the garrison surrendered the next day and the war lasted until 1865.

Who was president of the Confederate States during the Civil War?

Jefferson Davis had been the U.S. secretary of war in the 1850s; captured in Georgia in May 1865, he spent two years in prison but was never tried for treason.

Where did Robert E. Lee surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865?

Appomattox Court House was the new home of Wilmer McLean, who had moved there to escape the war after its first major battle raged around his old farm; Lee surrendered in his parlor on April 9, 1865.

Which amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States?

The 13th Amendment was needed because the Emancipation Proclamation had freed enslaved people only in areas held by the Confederacy; ratified on December 6, 1865, it ended slavery throughout the United States.

What name is given to the era after the Civil War that ended when federal troops left the South in 1877?

Reconstruction ended when Rutherford B. Hayes, handed the disputed 1876 election, withdrew the last federal troops from the South; Southern states then stripped most Black citizens of the vote.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, was killed in an 1804 duel by which man?

Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president, was charged with murder in both New York and New Jersey, yet neither case came to trial and he went back to Washington to finish his term.

Which president launched the New Deal in 1933 to fight the Great Depression?

Franklin Roosevelt took office in March 1933 with nearly a quarter of the workforce jobless; within two days he had shut every bank in the country for a 'holiday' to stop the panic.

Which law of motion states that an object stays at rest or in uniform motion unless a force acts on it?

Newton's first law, the law of inertia, overturned a belief dating back to Aristotle: that a moving object naturally comes to rest unless something keeps pushing it.

Newton's third law says that for every action there is what?

Newton's third law pairs every action with an equal and opposite reaction, which is why a rocket moves forward as it pushes exhaust backward.

Elements in the modern periodic table are arranged in order of increasing what?

Atomic number, the count of protons, replaced atomic mass as the ordering after Henry Moseley's X-ray experiments in 1913 showed it was the property that sets an element's place.

Who published the periodic table of the elements that gained wide acceptance in 1869?

Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the elements by atomic weight in 1869, leaving gaps for undiscovered elements such as gallium and germanium and predicting their properties.

Which family of elements, in the far-right column of the periodic table, almost never reacts with others?

Noble gases such as helium, neon and argon almost never react because their outermost shells are already full, which is why they were long called the inert gases.

Which subatomic particle carries a negative charge?

Electron: in 1897 J. J. Thomson showed that cathode rays were streams of negative particles far smaller than any atom, the first proof that atoms have parts.

Atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons are called what?

Isotopes of one element differ only in their neutrons: carbon-12 is stable, while carbon-14 slowly decays, and measuring how much is left lets scientists date ancient wood and bone.

Which organelle is where aerobic respiration produces most of a cell's ATP?

The mitochondrion makes most of a cell's ATP; it carries its own small genome because it is thought to descend from a free-living bacterium that another cell engulfed long ago.

Who discovered and named cells in 1665 after looking at cork under a microscope?

Robert Hooke saw rows of tiny empty boxes in a thin slice of cork, likened them to a honeycomb, and named them cells, from the Latin cella, a small room, in his 1665 book Micrographia.

Cells that lack a membrane-bound nucleus, such as bacteria, are called what?

Prokaryotes such as bacteria have no nucleus and are built differently from our own cells in other ways too, which is why antibiotics can attack them while largely leaving human cells alone.

Photosynthesis takes in carbon dioxide, water and light and releases which gas?

Photosynthesis releases oxygen, which comes from splitting water molecules inside the chloroplasts; the other product is the sugar glucose.

Chlorophyll gives leaves their colour by doing what with the middle part of the visible light spectrum?

Reflecting it: chlorophyll soaks up mainly red and blue light to power photosynthesis and reflects the green in between, which is why leaves look green.

Which layer of the Earth is the thickest?

The mantle is about 2,900 km thick and makes up most of the planet; it is solid rock, yet over millions of years it creeps like a very thick liquid.

Earth's inner core is mostly made of which metal?

Iron, alloyed with some nickel, makes up the inner core; it is hot enough to melt, yet the crushing pressure at Earth's centre keeps it solid while the outer core stays liquid.

Who proposed the theory of continental drift in 1912?

Alfred Wegener presented continental drift in 1912, citing matching coastlines and fossils across the Atlantic; plate tectonics confirmed the idea in the 1960s.

Which supercontinent once held nearly all of Earth's land before breaking into today's continents?

Pangaea, from the Greek for 'all' and 'earth', left its outline behind when it tore apart: the coastlines of South America and Africa still fit together across the Atlantic.

What powers the water cycle?

The Sun's heat drives evaporation, which lifts water into the air to fall again as rain; about 97 percent of Earth's water sits in the oceans, where most evaporation happens.

Density is defined as mass divided by what?

Density equals mass divided by volume; liquid water is about 1 g/cm³, so anything with a lower density floats in it.

Which ancient Greek reportedly leapt from his bath shouting 'Eureka!' after solving a puzzle about a king's crown?

Archimedes of Syracuse, as Vitruvius tells it, was testing whether King Hiero's crown was pure gold and ran through the streets naked shouting 'Eureka'.

On the pH scale, a solution with a value below 7 is described as what?

The scale is logarithmic, so pH 4 is ten times more acidic than pH 5; it was introduced by Sørensen in 1909.

Kinetic energy is the energy an object has because of what?

Movement gives an object its kinetic energy, and speed counts most: because the formula squares the speed, a car going twice as fast carries four times the energy.

Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?

Light travels about 300,000 km per second — exactly 299,792,458 m/s, a figure that has defined the metre since 1983; a light beam reaches the Moon in about 1.3 seconds.

In a right triangle, the Pythagorean theorem states that a² + b² equals what?

c² completes the theorem: the squares on the two legs add up to the square on the hypotenuse; James Garfield published a proof of his own in 1876, five years before he became president.

A right triangle with legs of 3 and 4 has a hypotenuse of what length?

3² + 4² = 9 + 16 = 25 = 5², so the hypotenuse is 5; the 3-4-5 triangle is the smallest Pythagorean triple.

In the equation y = mx + b, what does m represent?

The slope m measures steepness, rise over run; why the letter m was chosen is unknown, and the popular story that it stands for the French monter, to climb, has no evidence behind it.

Two lines are perpendicular when the product of their slopes equals what?

The product is -1 because each slope is the negative reciprocal of the other: a line with slope 2 is perpendicular to one with slope -1/2, while parallel lines have equal slopes.

Which of these numbers is prime?

31 is prime, with no divisors except 1 and itself; the other three options are composite, and Euclid proved there are infinitely many primes.

What is the least common multiple of 6 and 8?

Multiples of 6 run 6, 12, 18, 24 and multiples of 8 run 8, 16, 24, so the smallest shared multiple is 24 (2³ × 3).

The interior angles of any triangle add up to how many degrees?

The interior angles of any triangle sum to 180 degrees, a straight angle, so an equilateral triangle has three angles of 60 degrees each.

What is the formula for the area of a circle?

πr² means area grows with the square of the radius, so a 12-inch pizza has more than twice the area of an 8-inch one; the circumference, by contrast, is 2πr.

In the mnemonic PEMDAS, what does the E stand for?

PEMDAS stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction; multiplication and division share a rank and run left to right, and the UK version is BODMAS.

Written in scientific notation, the coefficient m in m × 10ⁿ is normally between which two values?

Between 1 and 10: the coefficient is at least 1 and under 10, so every number has just one such form; Avogadro's number, for example, is about 6.022 × 10²³.

Who narrates S. E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders?

Fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis narrates The Outsiders, which Hinton wrote while still a high-school student in Tulsa and published in 1967; Francis Ford Coppola filmed it in 1983.

In The Outsiders, the greasers' wealthy rivals are known by what name?

The Socs, short for Socials, are the rich kids from the other side of town; Hinton, a Tulsa teenager, drew the feud from rival groups at her own high school.

To what name did Anne Frank address the entries in her diary?

Anne addressed most entries 'Dear Kitty', writing from June 1942 until August 1944; her father Otto Frank published the diary in 1947.

In which city did Anne Frank and her family hide in the annex behind her father's business?

The family hid from July 1942 in the Secret Annex at Prinsengracht 263, Amsterdam, until their arrest in August 1944; Anne died at 15 in Bergen-Belsen.

In Lois Lowry's The Giver, what role is 12-year-old Jonas assigned?

Jonas is selected as the next Receiver of Memory and trains under the current Receiver, the Giver; the novel won the 1994 Newbery Medal.

Who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960?

Harper Lee drew on her Monroeville, Alabama childhood for the novel, which won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; her friend Truman Capote inspired the character Dill.

What is the profession of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird?

Lawyer Atticus Finch agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a white woman in Maycomb, Alabama, and the case turns much of the white town against his family.

Romeo and Juliet belong to which two feuding families?

Montague and Capulet were old names by Shakespeare's day: Dante had already paired the Montecchi and Cappelletti in his Purgatorio almost three centuries earlier.

Which figure of speech compares two things using the words 'like' or 'as'?

'Odysseus is like a weasel' is a simile; drop the 'like' and it becomes a metaphor.

Which river, generally regarded as the world's longest, flows north into the Mediterranean Sea?

The Nile once flooded every year, spreading the silt that fed Egypt's farms, until the Aswan High Dam ended the annual flood in 1970.

Mount Everest sits on the border between Nepal and which other country?

China and Nepal long disagreed over whether to count the summit's snow cap; in 2020 they jointly announced one agreed height, 8,848.86 m.

What is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceans?

The Pacific is big enough to hold all of the world's continents; Magellan named it for the calm water he found on entering it in 1520, 'pacific' meaning peaceful.

The Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on Earth, lies in which trench?

The Challenger Deep lies at the southern end of the Mariana Trench, southwest of Guam, about 10,900 metres down, deeper than Everest is tall.

How many words long is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?

About 270 words, spoken in roughly two minutes; the day's main speaker, Edward Everett, had just talked for two hours and wrote to Lincoln that he wished he had come as near the point.

Which 1954 Supreme Court ruling struck down the doctrine of 'separate but equal'?

Brown v. Board of Education held unanimously that separate schools are inherently unequal, overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had allowed segregation since 1896.

What does a drop in the surrounding air pressure do to a liquid's boiling point?

It lowers it: a liquid boils when its vapour pressure matches the surrounding pressure, so water boils below 100 °C at high altitude.

Shays's Rebellion (1786–87) saw indebted farmers march on an armory in which state?

Massachusetts farmers, with war veteran Daniel Shays as their best-known leader, marched on the federal armory at Springfield in January 1787; the weak national response fed the push for a new constitution.

For apportioning the House, the 1787 Constitution counted each enslaved person as what fraction?

The three-fifths clause counted 60 percent of each state's enslaved people towards its House seats and electoral votes, though none of them could vote; the 14th Amendment superseded it in 1868.

The 1803 case Marbury versus Madison established which power of the Supreme Court?

Judicial review, the power to strike down laws, came out of a sidestep: Chief Justice John Marshall found Madison had acted illegally, yet voided part of the Judiciary Act instead of ordering him to hand over Marbury's commission.

Which machine, patented by Eli Whitney in 1794, separated fibers from seeds?

Whitney's cotton gin pulled seeds from short-staple cotton far faster than hand-picking; the crop became so profitable that plantations bought more enslaved workers to grow and pick it.

The canal completed across New York in 1825 linked the Hudson River to which body of water?

Lake Erie was reached at Buffalo, 363 miles from Albany on the Hudson; opponents of Governor DeWitt Clinton ridiculed the project as 'Clinton's Ditch' while it was being dug.

The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was the first gathering devoted to which cause?

Women's rights: Elizabeth Cady Stanton modelled the convention's Declaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence, changing one line to read 'all men and women are created equal'.

Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which state entered the Union as a free state?

Maine entered the Union as a free state in March 1820 to balance Missouri's admission as a slave state; the deal also barred slavery in Louisiana Purchase lands north of 36°30′.

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended which war?

The Mexican–American War of 1846–48 ended with Mexico ceding about 55 percent of its territory, including all of present-day California and Nevada, and recognising the Rio Grande border.

The first transcontinental railroad was joined at Promontory Summit in 1869, in which territory?

Utah Territory hosted the golden spike ceremony on May 10, 1869; a spike and hammer were wired to the telegraph so the whole country could follow the blows, and the one-word message 'Done' went out.

Who was the first U.S. president to be impeached, in 1868?

The House impeached Andrew Johnson in February 1868 for trying to remove War Secretary Edwin Stanton; the Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed to convict.

Which rock type forms when magma or lava cools and hardens?

Igneous rock, from the Latin igneus meaning fiery, forms as magma or lava cools — granite slowly underground, basalt quickly at the surface.

Which mineral sits at the top of the Mohs hardness scale with a value of 10?

Diamond tops the Mohs scale at 10, but the scale only ranks minerals by which can scratch which, so its numbers are places in a queue, not measurements of how much harder each one is.

Gregor Mendel worked out dominant and recessive traits by cross-breeding which crop?

Peas gave Mendel clear either-or traits such as yellow or green seeds; his 1866 paper had to be rediscovered by three botanists in 1900 before it became the foundation of genetics.

Heat moving from a stove burner into a pan touching it is an example of what?

Conduction transfers heat through direct contact as vibrating particles jostle their neighbours; convection carries heat in moving fluids, and radiation needs no matter at all.

Which band of the electromagnetic spectrum has the highest frequency?

Gamma rays have the highest frequency and the most energy of any light, enough to pass right through the human body and damage the DNA in its cells on the way.

California's San Andreas Fault is the classic example of which type of plate boundary?

Transform boundaries are where plates slide sideways past each other; along the San Andreas, Los Angeles is creeping northwest toward San Francisco about as fast as fingernails grow.

A real number that cannot be written as a fraction of two integers is called what?

Irrational numbers such as √2 and π have decimals that never end or repeat; legend has it that Hippasus, the Pythagorean who revealed this about √2, was drowned at sea for it.

What is the sum of the exterior angles of any convex polygon, in degrees?

The exterior angles of any convex polygon sum to 360 degrees: walking once around it turns you through exactly one full revolution, however many sides it has.

In Flowers for Algernon, what kind of animal is Algernon?

Algernon is a laboratory mouse whose intelligence was boosted by experimental surgery; Charlie Gordon, a bakery worker with an IQ of 68, undergoes the same operation.

In Poe's 'The Raven', what single word does the bird keep repeating?

Nevermore was chosen for its sound: Poe wrote that he wanted the long 'o' and the 'r' for a mournful refrain, and that he first pictured a parrot repeating it before settling on a raven.