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.

How many articles does the original U.S. Constitution contain?

The Constitution has seven articles: Articles I to III create the legislative, executive and judicial branches, and Article VII sets out how the document would be ratified.

How many times has the U.S. Constitution been amended?

The Constitution has 27 amendments; the 27th, on congressional pay, was ratified in 1992, more than 200 years after Congress proposed it.

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, ratified in 1791, guarantees those five freedoms; the Second covers the right to bear arms and the Fifth guards against self-incrimination.

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.

The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4 of which year?

The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration on July 4, 1776, and fifty-six delegates eventually signed the engrossed copy, most of them on August 2.

Who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence?

Jefferson wrote most of it between June 11 and 28; Franklin and Adams were on the drafting committee with him.

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

The Declaration names 'the pursuit of Happiness'; the phrase echoes John Locke's natural rights of life, liberty and property, with the last term changed.

Which battles in April 1775 were the first of the American Revolutionary War?

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?

The alliance came after the American victory at Saratoga convinced Europe the rebels could win.

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.

What cargo did the Sons of Liberty dump into Boston Harbor in December 1773?

Disguised as Native Americans, they boarded the Dartmouth and other ships in protest at the Tea Act; Britain answered with the Intolerable Acts.

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?

The United States paid about $15 million for some 828,000 square miles, under three cents an acre; the deal nearly doubled the country's size.

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.

Sacagawea, who helped the Lewis and Clark expedition as an interpreter, belonged to which nation?

Sacagawea was Lemhi Shoshone, captured by Hidatsa raiders as a girl; she travelled with her husband Toussaint Charbonneau and their newborn son, Jean Baptiste, born February 1805.

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

British troops burned the White House in August 1814 after routing American militia at Bladensburg; Dolley Madison had Stuart’s portrait of Washington carried to safety.

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?

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams drafted most of the Monroe Doctrine, which President Monroe delivered in his December 2, 1823 annual message to Congress.

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

Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830; about 60,000 people from the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations were forced west, and thousands died.

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?

The Mayflower Compact established self-government for Plymouth Colony; 41 of the Mayflower's 102 passengers signed it on November 11, 1620 while anchored off Cape Cod.

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, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi, was chosen provisional president in February 1861 and led the Confederacy of eleven seceded states until its collapse in 1865.

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

Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865, in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house.

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

It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments; the 15th (1870) barred denying the vote on account of race.

The Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War ended with a political compromise in which year?

The Compromise of 1877 settled the disputed 1876 election: Rutherford B. Hayes took the presidency and the last federal troops left the South, ending Reconstruction.

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

Vice President Aaron Burr shot Hamilton at Weehawken, New Jersey on July 11, 1804; Hamilton died the next day, having written 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers.

The Great Depression began with a stock market crash in which year?

The crash of October 1929, with Black Tuesday on October 29, opened the Depression; by 1933 U.S. unemployment had reached about 25 percent and Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal.

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 is also called the law of inertia; all three laws of motion appeared in his Principia in 1687.

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 is the number of protons; the horizontal rows are periods and the columns are groups.

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.

What is the name for the elements in Group 18 of the periodic table, such as helium and neon?

The noble gases — helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon — rarely react with other elements because their outermost shells are full.

Which subatomic particle carries a negative charge?

Electrons carry the negative charge, discovered by J. J. Thomson in 1897; protons are positive and neutrons neutral, so the nucleus as a whole is positive.

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

Carbon-12 and carbon-14 are isotopes; the second is used for radiocarbon dating.

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

The mitochondrion is where aerobic respiration makes most of a cell's ATP; its inner membrane folds into cristae, and it carries its own small DNA.

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

Robert Hooke described the cork's tiny compartments in Micrographia (1665) and called them cells because they resembled the small rooms monks lived in.

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

Prokaryotes such as bacteria and archaea keep their DNA in a region called the nucleoid instead of a membrane-bound nucleus.

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?

The pigment absorbs mainly red and blue light and bounces the green part of the spectrum back at your eyes.

Which layer of the Earth is the thickest?

The mantle reaches down about 2,890 km; the crust is only 5 to 70 km thick.

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

The inner core is a solid ball of mostly iron with some nickel, about 1,220 km in radius; unlike the liquid outer core it transmits shear waves.

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.

What was the name of the single supercontinent that later broke apart into today's continents?

Pangaea, from Greek for 'all land', formed about 300 million years ago and began breaking apart about 200 million years ago into Laurasia and Gondwana.

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 shouted 'Eureka!' after realising water displacement reveals volume?

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?

Kinetic energy is the energy of movement: the formula is one half times mass times speed squared, and it is measured in joules.

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?

The hypotenuse c satisfies c² = a² + b², so the squares on the two legs together equal the square on the hypotenuse; Elisha Loomis's The Pythagorean Proposition collects 370 proofs.

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?

Slope is rise over run; a horizontal line has a slope of zero.

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

Parallel lines, by contrast, 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?

The area of a circle is πr², so a circle of radius 2 has area 4π, about 12.57; the circumference 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?

In scientific notation the coefficient is at least 1 and less than 10; Avogadro’s number, for example, is written as about 6.022 × 10²³.

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

Fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis narrates The Outsiders, which Hinton began at 15 and published in 1967 at 18; Francis Ford Coppola filmed it in 1983.

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

The Socs, short for 'Socials' and pronounced 'SOH-shiz', are the rich West Side kids who clash with the greasers in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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?

Atticus Finch is a lawyer in Maycomb, Alabama who defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of rape, before an all-white jury.

Romeo and Juliet belong to which two feuding families?

Romeo is a Montague and Juliet a Capulet, 'two households, both alike in dignity' in Verona, as the play's opening sonnet-prologue puts it.

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?

Its two main tributaries, the White Nile and Blue Nile, meet at Khartoum in Sudan.

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

Everest’s summit lies on the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet region; it rises 8,848.86 m, and Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the summit in 1953.

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

The Pacific covers about 46 percent of the planet's water surface, more than all the land on Earth combined; Magellan named it 'Mar Pacífico', the peaceful sea, in 1520.

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?

The address runs about 270 words (the Bliss copy has 272); Lincoln delivered it in under two minutes on November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery.

How many articles of amendment did Congress send to the states in 1789?

Congress sent twelve articles to the states in September 1789; ten were ratified in 1791, and one leftover, on congressional pay, was finally ratified in 1992.

How does lowering the surrounding air pressure affect the boiling point of a liquid?

Lower air pressure lowers the boiling point: 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?

Daniel Shays led indebted farmers against the federal armory at Springfield, Massachusetts in January 1787; the Confederation government's inability to respond helped spur the constitutional convention.

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

The three-fifths clause handed Southern states extra House seats and electoral votes by counting 60 percent of their enslaved population; the 14th Amendment superseded it in 1868.

Marbury v. Madison (1803) established which power of the Supreme Court?

Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Madison had acted illegally yet declined to order him to deliver the commission, striking down part of the Judiciary Act instead.

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?

The Erie Canal ran 363 miles from Albany on the Hudson to Buffalo on Lake Erie; opponents mocked 'Clinton's Big Ditch', yet tolls repaid its roughly $7 million cost by the 1830s.

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

The convention, organised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, launched the campaign for women’s rights with its Declaration of Sentiments; it met in a Wesleyan chapel on July 19–20, 1848.

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?

The golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory on May 10, 1869, joining the track built west from Omaha with the track built east from Sacramento.

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, at 10, tops the Mohs scale; the scale is only ordinal, and in absolute terms diamond is about four times harder than corundum at 9.

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

Mendel cross-bred garden peas (Pisum sativum) in the monastery garden at Brno, tracking traits such as seed colour and shape, and published his results in 1866.

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 shortest wavelengths, shorter than an atom's width; Paul Villard discovered them in 1900 while studying radium.

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

At a transform boundary plates slide past each other horizontally; along the San Andreas the plate carrying Los Angeles moves northwest past the North American Plate at 20 to 35 mm a year.

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

Irrational numbers such as √2 and π have decimal expansions that never end or repeat; √2 was proved irrational by the ancient Greeks.

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?

The raven answers every question with 'Nevermore'; the poem, published in January 1845, follows a grieving lover mourning Lenore as the bird perches on a bust of Pallas.