166 Fun Facts About 5th and 6th Grade

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

The Pacific is so big that every continent could fit inside it with room to spare, and its Mariana Trench is deep enough to drown Mount Everest with about 2 km of water above the peak.

Which river carries more water than any other on Earth?

The Amazon carries about a fifth of all the river water reaching the world's oceans, so much that it dilutes the sea's saltiness more than 160 km from shore.

The Nile River flows north and empties into which sea?

The Mediterranean takes the Nile through its delta north of Cairo; since the river runs from south to north, the upland south is called Upper Egypt and the delta Lower Egypt.

The Sahara is the largest hot desert, but which two deserts are bigger overall?

Antarctica and the Arctic are polar deserts: a desert is defined by scant precipitation, not heat, and at roughly 14 million square km each they outsize the 9 million square km Sahara.

Mount Everest's summit sits on China's border with which other country?

Nepal and China long gave different heights for the peak because Nepal counted the snow cap and China only the rock beneath, until a joint survey in 2020 settled on one figure.

Which of these numbers is a prime number?

23 is prime; 21 is 3 x 7, 25 is 5 x 5 and 27 is 3 x 9. Every whole number greater than 1 is either prime or a product of primes.

A right angle measures exactly how many degrees?

A right angle is 90 degrees, the corner of a square; the 'right' translates the Latin rectus, meaning upright, like a line standing straight up from its base.

Pi, about 3.14159, is what you get when you divide a circle's circumference by what?

Its diameter is the divisor, so every circle is a little over three diameters around; pi's decimals never end or repeat, and Pi Day, March 14, is also Einstein's birthday.

In the fraction 3/4, what is the number 4 called?

The denominator, from the Latin for 'that which names', names the size of the parts, here fourths, while the numerator on top counts how many of them there are.

What do we call the total distance around the outside of a shape?

Perimeter comes from the Greek for 'around' and 'measure'; on a circle the same distance gets a name of its own, the circumference.

Plants make their own food using sunlight, water and which gas from the air?

Carbon dioxide enters through pores in the leaves, and photosynthesis uses light energy to combine it with water into glucose, the sugar the plant lives on.

Which part of a cell is nicknamed the 'powerhouse' because it turns food into a fuel molecule called ATP?

The mitochondrion carries its own DNA, passed down almost entirely from your mother, because it began as a free-living bacterium that another cell engulfed more than a billion years ago.

Who first saw cells in a thin slice of cork in 1665 and gave them their name?

Robert Hooke described the tiny boxes in cork in his 1665 book Micrographia, likened them to a honeycomb and called them cells, from the Latin for a small room.

How many bones does an adult human have once childhood bones have fused?

206 in an adult: a baby is born with about 270 to 300 softer bones and pieces of cartilage, and many of them fuse together as the skeleton grows.

Which of these is one of the six classical simple machines?

The pulley joins the lever, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge and screw; one pulley only redirects your pull, but several rigged together let you lift a load with a fraction of the force.

The fixed point that a lever pivots on is called what?

The fulcrum is the pivot point a lever turns on; Archimedes supposedly said that with a long enough lever and a place to stand he could move the world.

Which is the smallest planet in the Solar System and the closest to the Sun?

Mercury is the smallest planet and the nearest to the Sun; its solar day, sunrise to sunrise, lasts about 176 Earth days, twice as long as its 88-day year.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is what kind of feature?

A giant storm, the Great Red Spot is a hurricane in reverse: it whirls around a centre of high pressure, where the great storms on Earth form around low pressure.

Which planet was found by mathematics before anyone saw it, from its tug on Uranus's orbit?

It is the eighth and farthest planet and cannot be seen without a telescope.

Which four planets are the rocky 'terrestrial' planets of the inner Solar System?

Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars formed close to the young Sun, where it was too hot for ice and gas to gather, so only rock and metal could clump together into planets.

What are the large moving pieces of Earth's rigid outer shell called?

Tectonic plates creep only a few centimetres a year, about as fast as fingernails grow, yet over some 200 million years that drift broke the supercontinent Pangaea into today's continents.

Where are most of Earth's volcanoes actually found?

Most volcanoes are underwater, strung along the mid-ocean ridge, a 65,000 km chain of undersea mountains where molten rock wells up as the sea floor spreads apart.

Which organ of the digestive tract absorbs most of the nutrients from food?

The small intestine does more than 90% of the absorbing because tiny finger-like villi line its walls, hugely multiplying the surface that food passes over.

The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on which date?

Congress adopted the Declaration on July 4, 1776, two days after voting for independence on July 2, the date John Adams expected Americans to celebrate.

Who wrote the original draft of the Declaration of Independence?

Thomas Jefferson wrote the draft in June 1776 for a committee of five that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin; Congress then edited and shortened his text before adopting it.

Colonists dumped more than 300 chests of tea into which city's harbour in December 1773?

Boston became the flashpoint because its governor refused to let the tea ships sail home still loaded, as ships sent to other ports did; the raiders emptied every chest in about three hours.

Which 1783 agreement ended the American Revolutionary War with Britain recognising US independence?

The Treaty of Paris, signed on 3 September 1783, ended the war; the last major battle had been at Yorktown in 1781, where the French fleet blocked Cornwallis's escape.

The US Constitution was written at a convention held in 1787 in which city?

Philadelphia's Independence Hall, where the Declaration had been signed, hosted the delegates, who agreed to keep every debate secret so that each could speak and change his mind freely.

The Bill of Rights, covering free speech, guns, trials and more, is the name for which amendments to the US Constitution?

The first ten amendments were ratified together in 1791; James Madison drafted them to answer Anti-Federalists who worried the new government had too much power.

In 1803 the United States bought the huge Louisiana Territory from which country?

France sold it because Napoleon, facing a new war with Britain and having lost an army to revolt and yellow fever in Haiti, gave up on an American empire and let it go for $15 million.

The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 declared enslaved people free in which part of the country?

It applied only to the Confederacy, the states in rebellion, and left slavery untouched in loyal border states such as Kentucky, where it stayed legal until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.

Lincoln's two-minute speech of November 1863 dedicated a soldiers' cemetery on which Civil War battlefield?

Gettysburg heard Edward Everett speak for two hours before Lincoln's two minutes; Everett wrote to him the next day wishing he had come as near the central idea of the occasion.

Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech at which 1963 event?

At the March on Washington, King left his prepared text after the singer Mahalia Jackson called out to him to tell them about the dream, and improvised the passage that made the speech famous.

The largest of Egypt's pyramids was built as a tomb for which pharaoh, also known as Cheops?

Khufu's Great Pyramid rose around 2600 BC; by Tutankhamun's day, some 1,300 years later, pharaohs no longer built pyramids, and he was buried in a tomb cut into rock.

Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is the only one still mostly standing?

The pyramid at Giza is by far the oldest of the seven, yet it alone survives; earthquakes brought down the Lighthouse, the Colossus and the Mausoleum, and fire took the Temple of Artemis.

What did the Nile's yearly flood leave behind on the fields of ancient Egypt?

The flood left fertile soil, a layer of black silt washed down from the Ethiopian highlands; surplus crops from it fed a dense population and paid for pyramids, temples and scribes.

Which heir of Julius Caesar became the first Roman emperor in 27 BC?

Augustus was the title the Senate gave Caesar's great-nephew Octavian in 27 BC, after he had beaten Mark Antony and Cleopatra; the month of August is named for him.

Long after the Qin, which dynasty built the brick-and-stone Great Wall seen today?

The Ming dynasty began its great wall-building in the decades after Mongol horsemen captured its emperor in battle in 1449, and its brick and stone stretches near Beijing are the ones visitors walk today.

In the sentence 'The dog barked loudly', which part of speech is 'barked'?

A verb is the engine of a sentence: 'barked' tells what the dog did, and a verb can even make a whole sentence by itself, as in 'Stop!' or 'Go.'

Which part of speech is a word like 'tall' or 'blue'?

An adjective describes a noun, and English stacks them in a set order, size before colour, which is why 'big blue ball' sounds right and 'blue big ball' sounds wrong.

'Her smile was as bright as the sun' is an example of which figure of speech?

A simile compares using 'like' or 'as', and the word itself comes from the Latin similis, 'like', the root of 'similar'; a metaphor drops the comparing word: 'her smile was the sun'.

'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' is the classic example of what?

Alliteration repeats the same starting sound, here the p that opens almost every word; the term was coined from the Latin littera, meaning letter.

Words like 'buzz', 'oink' and 'hiccup' are examples of which figure of speech?

Onomatopoeia is Greek for 'making a name', and it changes by language: a dog says 'woof' in English, 'wan wan' in Japanese and 'guau' in Spanish.

A traditional haiku has three lines with syllables in what pattern?

5, 7, 5 makes just seventeen syllables; the form is so short because it began as the opening verse of much longer linked poems, then broke away to stand alone.

In 'The Lightning Thief', Percy Jackson discovers that his father is which Greek god?

Poseidon, god of the sea, claims Percy as his son after a hellhound attacks him at camp; Percy's favourite teacher, Mr. Brunner, turns out to be the centaur Chiron.

Which R. J. Palacio novel follows Auggie Pullman, a boy with a facial difference, through fifth grade at Beecher Prep?

Wonder grew out of a moment in an ice cream shop: R. J. Palacio's young son cried on seeing a girl with a facial difference, and she hurried her children away.

What was the first Harry Potter book retitled for its 1998 US release?

Scholastic published it as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, a new title J. K. Rowling agreed to for American readers; she later said she wished she had not.

In Louis Sachar's 'Holes', Stanley Yelnats is sent to which correctional boot camp in the Texas desert?

Camp Green Lake, a dried-up lakebed where the boys dig a hole a day, is Stanley's sentence; the book won the National Book Award and the Newbery Medal, and Disney filmed it in 2003.

In Gary Paulsen's 'Hatchet', what leaves 13-year-old Brian Robeson alone in the wilderness?

His plane crashes into a Canadian lake after the pilot of the small bush plane dies of a heart attack; Brian's only tool is the hatchet his mother gave him.

Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, about a Jewish friend's escape in 1943, is set in which country?

Denmark is the setting: Annemarie Johansen's family in Copenhagen hides her friend Ellen Rosen, in a story inspired by the real 1943 rescue of nearly all of Denmark's Jews.

In 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid', Greg Heffley insists he is writing what, not a 'diary'?

A journal, Greg insists, because his mom bought one with 'diary' on the cover against his orders; Jeff Kinney first published the story online in 2004, three years before the printed book.

Which gas makes up about 78% of the air you breathe?

Oxygen is only about a fifth of the air; most of every breath is nitrogen, which your body simply breathes back out.

Which state became the 50th to join the United States, in August 1959?

Hawaii became the 50th state on 21 August 1959, months after Alaska, so the 49-star flag flew for only one year before today's 50-star flag replaced it in July 1960.

The Preamble to the US Constitution begins with which three words?

'We the People' first headed a draft that went on to name every state one by one, until Gouverneur Morris's committee replaced the list with 'of the United States'.

How many members are there in the United States Senate?

There are 100 senators, two from each of the 50 states regardless of population, so Vermont has as many as California; the House has 435 voting members.

After solid, liquid and gas, what is the fourth state of matter?

Plasma is what stars are made of, so it is actually the most common state of ordinary matter in the universe.

Which African country became independent in 2011 after a referendum?

South Sudan voted almost 99% for independence in a January 2011 referendum that followed decades of civil war, and became a country that July.

Which part of your bloodstream picks up oxygen in the lungs and carries it around the body?

Red blood cells carry oxygen bound to hemoglobin, the iron-rich protein that also gives them their colour; each cell circulates for about 120 days.

Shakespeare set most of Romeo and Juliet in which Italian city?

Verona came with the story: Shakespeare took the plot from Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem, an English retelling of Italian tales about the lovers and their feuding families.

In the math memory aid PEMDAS, what does the P stand for?

Parentheses come first, but the acronym hides a catch: multiplication and division rank equally and are worked left to right, as are addition and subtraction.

On the Fahrenheit scale, at what temperature does water boil at sea level?

212 °F is where water boils at sea level; Daniel Fahrenheit set his zero not at freezing water but at the temperature of a slushy mix of ice and salt.

Which country is the largest in the world by area, spanning eleven time zones?

Russia covers about 17 million square kilometres, so vast that the train from Moscow to Vladivostok, more than 9,000 km away, takes about a week.

Mount Rushmore stands in the Black Hills of which state?

South Dakota's state historian proposed the carving to draw tourists to the Black Hills, and he first pictured heroes of the West such as the Sioux chief Red Cloud, not presidents.

Einstein's equation E = mc² says energy equals mass times the square of what?

The speed of light is so large that, squared, it makes a little mass worth enormous energy: the Sun shines by turning more than four million tonnes of matter into energy every second.

Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in which two subjects?

Physics and Chemistry: the 1903 physics committee at first meant to honour only her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and added her after Pierre objected; in 1911 she won chemistry alone.

In 1932, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across which body of water?

She aimed for Paris, but ice and mechanical trouble forced her down in a Northern Ireland pasture after nearly 15 hours over the Atlantic, five years after Lindbergh's flight.

Which gas do plants release as a byproduct of photosynthesis?

Oxygen is what is left over when photosynthesis splits water; roughly half of the oxygen made on Earth comes not from land plants but from tiny plankton drifting in the ocean.

Most of the water that evaporates into Earth's air rises from which source?

The oceans supply close to nine-tenths of the water vapour in the air; winds carry part of it over land, where it falls as rain and snow and runs back to the sea.

How many chambers does the human heart have?

Four: two atria on top receive blood and two ventricles below pump it out, with the left ventricle the most muscular because it must push blood around the whole body.

A blue whale's diet consists almost entirely of which tiny creatures?

Krill, shrimp-like crustaceans a few centimetres long, make up almost all of a blue whale's food; a feeding whale can swallow several tonnes a day through its baleen plates.

Which animal is the fastest on land, sprinting at about 100 km/h?

The cheetah has been reliably clocked at about 100 km/h, yet unlike lions and tigers it cannot roar; it purrs like a house cat instead.

Which animals are the only mammals capable of true, sustained flight?

Bats fly by flapping wings of thin membrane stretched over long finger bones; flying squirrels, sugar gliders and colugos can only glide from tree to tree.

Which is the smallest bird species in the world?

The bee hummingbird of Cuba may be tiny, yet it visits as many as 1,500 flowers in a single day, carrying pollen from one to the next as it feeds.

Which flightless bird is the fastest bird on land, running at about 70 km/h?

The ostrich is built to run: it has just two toes on each foot, where most birds have four, and a single stride can cover 3 to 5 metres.

Sloths live in the tropical rainforests of which two regions?

South and Central America are the only home of sloths, whose grooved fur grows green algae that helps hide them among the leaves.

Which ocean predator keeps growing new teeth to replace any it loses?

The great white shark replaces lost teeth like a conveyor belt; because a shark's skeleton is soft cartilage, those teeth are usually the only part of it that ends up as a fossil.

Which insects, close relatives of wasps and bees, live in colonies built around egg-laying queens?

Ants evolved from wasp-like ancestors, and more than 13,800 species have been named; termites live much the same way but are really close kin of cockroaches.

What is a baby kangaroo called?

A joey is born about the size of a jellybean after roughly a month's gestation, then finishes developing in its mother's pouch for several months.

Which is the largest living species of penguin?

The emperor penguin outranks even the king penguin; the male balances the pair's single egg on his feet through the dark polar winter, fasting for months until it hatches.

Why must an owl turn its whole head to look around?

Its eyes are fixed in their sockets: tube-shaped rather than round, they cannot swivel, so the owl turns its head up to 270 degrees instead.

Which bird builds the largest nest of any North American bird?

The bald eagle builds the biggest because pairs return to the same nest and add sticks year after year; the largest on record grew to about 3 m across and 6 m deep.

Roughly how many Earths could fit inside the Sun?

About 1.3 million Earths would fill the Sun, which holds more than 99% of all the mass in the Solar System, so its gravity keeps every planet in orbit.

The Moon's diameter is roughly what fraction of Earth's?

One quarter of Earth's width, the Moon is also, by chance, about 400 times smaller than the Sun and 400 times closer, so it can just cover the Sun in a total eclipse.

Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, rises on which planet?

Mars has Olympus Mons because its crust does not drift as Earth's does: the volcano sat over one hot spot and kept piling up lava for ages.

What has the Great Red Spot been doing for over a century?

Shrinking: tracked since 1831, the spot could once have swallowed three Earths, and nobody knows whether it will settle at a smaller size or fade away.

Which moon is the only one in the Solar System with a thick atmosphere?

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, hides under an orange haze so thick that its lakes of liquid methane went unseen until the Cassini probe's radar looked through.

Which planet is the hottest in the Solar System, even though another planet orbits closer to the Sun?

Venus is wrapped in thick carbon dioxide that traps heat, so its surface stays at about 465 °C, hot enough to melt lead.

Which planet spins on its side, with an axial tilt of about 98 degrees?

Uranus is tipped about 98 degrees, perhaps by an ancient collision, so it rolls around the Sun like a ball and each pole spends decades in darkness.

Which astronomer discovered the planet Uranus with a telescope in 1781?

William Herschel first took Uranus for a comet, then tried to name the new planet 'George's Star' after King George III; the name never caught on.

What is the name of Pluto's largest moon?

Charon is about half as wide as Pluto, so large that the pair circle a point in the space between them and are sometimes called a double dwarf planet.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about how far?

9.46 trillion km: even at that pace, light from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun, takes more than four years to reach us.

Which inventor held 1,093 US patents?

Thomas Edison tested his first phonograph in 1877 by reciting 'Mary had a little lamb' into it and hearing the machine say the rhyme back.

Where did the Wright brothers make the first powered airplane flight in 1903?

Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina: Wilbur won a coin toss for the first try but stalled into the sand, so three days later Orville made the 12-second first flight.

Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravity appeared in which 1687 book?

Principia might never have appeared without Edmond Halley, of comet fame, who coaxed Newton into writing it and then paid for the printing himself.

Galileo discovered the four largest moons of which planet in 1610?

Jupiter's four big moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, were the first bodies seen circling another planet, a blow to the old belief that everything orbits Earth.

Charles Darwin developed his ideas after a five-year voyage aboard which ship?

HMS Beagle carried Darwin around the world from 1831 to 1836; the plants, animals and fossils he collected, not least in the Galápagos, set him thinking about how species change.

Louis Pasteur developed vaccines against anthrax and which deadly disease?

Pasteur's rabies vaccine was first used on nine-year-old Joseph Meister in July 1885 after a dog bite; pasteurization is also named after him.

Marie Curie and her husband Pierre discovered which two elements in 1898?

Radium and polonium both turned up in 1898 in a uranium ore; she named polonium for her native Poland, and radium takes its name from the Latin for 'ray'.

Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining what?

The photoelectric effect: in 1905 Einstein showed that light knocks electrons out of metal because it arrives in packets of energy, later called photons.

Benjamin Franklin was the first person to hold which job for the United States?

Postmaster general: the Continental Congress gave Franklin the job in July 1775, a year and a half after Britain sacked him as the colonies' postmaster for siding with the rebels.

Who followed George Washington as the second US president in 1797?

John Adams, Washington's vice president, beat Thomas Jefferson by just three electoral votes, 71 to 68, so under the rules of the day his rival became his vice president.

Who shot President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in 1865?

John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor who sided with the South, struck just five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox; Lincoln died the next morning.

Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase did what to the size of the United States?

Doubled it: Jefferson's envoys had been sent to buy little more than the port of New Orleans and came home with about 828,000 square miles of the West.

Who became the youngest US president ever at 42, a year younger than John F. Kennedy was?

Theodore Roosevelt was 42 when President McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and the job passed to him; Kennedy, at 43, remains the youngest ever elected.

Franklin D. Roosevelt served as president from 1933 until what?

His death in 1945 came less than three months into a fourth term; no president before him had served more than two, and since 1951 the Constitution has ruled it out.

Who led about 70 enslaved people to freedom on some 13 trips?

Harriet Tubman went back for family and friends and later said she 'never lost a passenger'; in the Civil War she served the Union Army as a scout and spy.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard which shuttle in 1983?

Sally Ride rode Challenger in June 1983 and became the first woman to work the shuttle's robotic arm, which she had helped develop, using it to release and retrieve a satellite.

Columbus first landed in 1492 on an island in which group?

The Bahamas: on 12 October 1492 Columbus stepped ashore on an island its people called Guanahani, renamed it San Salvador, and went on believing he had reached Asia.

Whose company built the metal framework inside the Statue of Liberty?

Gustave Eiffel was hired after the statue's first engineer died in 1879, and built the iron skeleton that carries the thin copper skin sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi designed.

British forces set fire to the White House during which war?

The War of 1812: British troops burned the house in August 1814; before fleeing, Dolley Madison had the frame of George Washington's portrait broken so the painting could be carried to safety.

Which sculptor oversaw the carving of Mount Rushmore from 1927 to 1941?

Gutzon Borglum led the work from 1927 until his death in March 1941, when his son Lincoln finished it; Borglum had earlier begun the Stone Mountain carving in Georgia.

Which river carved the Grand Canyon?

The Colorado River cut a gorge a mile deep and up to 18 miles wide, yet so much of its water is now taken for farms and cities that it rarely reaches the sea.

Which is the largest of the three waterfalls that make up Niagara?

Horseshoe Falls takes about 90% of the water that reaches the brink; under a 1950 treaty the flow is halved at night, when more of the river is sent to power stations.

Which great American river begins as a small stream flowing out of Lake Itasca in Minnesota?

The Mississippi leaves Lake Itasca only 20 to 30 feet wide, small enough to cross on stepping stones, before growing into one of the world's great rivers.

Which lake was officially a Great Lake for 18 days in 1998?

Lake Champlain got the title in a bill meant to open research money to Vermont's colleges; after an uproar, the Senate took the name back and left the funding in place.

Yellowstone, the first national park, is mainly in which state?

Wyoming holds 96% of Yellowstone, which sits on a huge volcano; its heat drives more than half of the world's geysers, Old Faithful among them.

Who reached the top of Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953?

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay spent only about 15 minutes on the summit; the famous photo from the top shows Tenzing alone, because Hillary was the one holding the camera.

Besides being the coldest continent, Antarctica is also which of these?

Windiest: cold, heavy air slides off Antarctica's high ice cap and races downhill to the coast in fierce gales.

Which is the driest continent that people live on?

Australia is the driest inhabited continent: deserts and dry scrub fill its centre, so most Australians live in cities along the greener coasts, above all in the east.

Canada is divided into ten provinces and three what?

Territories: Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, the newest, created in 1999 to give the Inuit a self-governing homeland.

Which country is a federation of 26 states plus a Federal District around its capital?

Brazil built a brand-new capital, Brasília, in its thinly settled interior and moved the government there from coastal Rio de Janeiro in 1960.

The Great Wall of China was built mainly to guard against raids from which direction?

The north: the walls were raised over many centuries to keep out nomads from the steppe, and a 2012 survey counted 21,196 km of them.

The Eiffel Tower was built as the centrepiece of the 1889 World's Fair to mark what?

100 years since the French Revolution of 1789: the tower was meant to stand for only 20 years, and was spared once it proved its worth as a giant radio mast.

In 2012, the London clock tower housing Big Ben was renamed after whom?

It became the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee; the name Big Ben strictly refers to the Great Bell inside.

Which living animals are classified as dinosaurs, having survived the extinction 66 million years ago?

Birds evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods, the same group as Tyrannosaurus rex, so every sparrow at the feeder is a living dinosaur.

What do most scientists say wiped out T. rex and the other giant dinosaurs 66 million years ago?

An asteroid impact: a rock at least 10 km wide struck what is now Mexico, and the soot and dust it threw up dimmed the Sun around the world.

Most Ring of Fire volcanoes form where one slab of Earth's crust does what?

Dives beneath another: the sinking slab carries water down with it, and that water melts the hot rock above, feeding the volcanoes overhead.

Which scale rates tornadoes from 0 to 5 by their damage?

The Fujita scale works backwards from the wreckage: surveyors judge the damage, then estimate the winds. Radar clocked one 1999 Oklahoma tornado at more than 300 mph.

Air around a lightning flash heats to roughly what temperature?

Lightning heats its channel to about 30,000 °C, roughly five times the surface of the Sun; the sudden expansion of that air creates thunder.

Which is the only even prime number?

2 is the only even prime: a prime has exactly two divisors, 1 and itself, and every other even number can also be divided by 2.

The four inside angles of any four-sided shape add up to how many degrees?

360 degrees, a full turn: cut any four-sided shape into two triangles and each brings 180, which is also why an octagon's angles reach 1080.

Which part of speech is a word like 'quickly' or 'gently'?

An adverb tells how, when or where; the -ly ending is a common clue but not a rule, since 'fast', 'hard' and 'well' are adverbs too.

What are words like 'to', 'too' and 'two' called?

Homophones share a sound but not a meaning, and they need not differ in spelling: 'rose' the flower and 'rose' the past tense of rise count too.

'I've told you a million times' is an example of which figure of speech?

Hyperbole comes from the Greek for 'throwing beyond': the claim overshoots the truth so far that no listener takes it literally.

In Roald Dahl's Matilda, who is the tyrannical headmistress?

Miss Trunchbull, a former Olympic hammer-thrower who swings pupils by their pigtails, runs Crunchem Hall; the kind teacher Miss Honey turns out to be her niece.

In James and the Giant Peach, what are the names of James's two cruel aunts?

Spiker and Sponge get what they deserve: when the Centipede bites through the stem, the giant peach rolls straight over both aunts and flattens them.

Who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

C. S. Lewis dedicated the book to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield, whose name he gave to the girl who first steps through the wardrobe into Narnia.

In The Hobbit, Bilbo joins Gandalf and thirteen dwarves to win back treasure from which dragon?

Smaug sleeps on the hoard he stole from the dwarves' kingdom under the Lonely Mountain, and the dwarves hire a reluctant Bilbo as their 'burglar' to help take it back.

Which Dr. Seuss book uses only 50 different words?

Green Eggs and Ham uses exactly 50 different words: publisher Bennett Cerf had bet Dr. Seuss $50 that he couldn't do it.

In Bridge to Terabithia, Jesse becomes friends with Leslie after she does what?

Beats him in a footrace: Jess had trained all summer to be the fastest runner in his class, and the new girl next door outran him and every other boy.

In The Giver, 12-year-old Jonas is chosen for which role?

Jonas is selected as the Receiver of Memory at the Ceremony of Twelve and trains with the Giver, who holds all the memories his society erased through 'Sameness'.

Which novel was inspired by a real woman stranded alone for 18 years?

Island of the Blue Dolphins was inspired by a Nicoleño woman left on San Nicolas Island in 1835; a sea otter hunter found her in 1853 and took her to Santa Barbara.

In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry travels through space and time to rescue whom?

Her missing dad is a scientist trapped on the dark planet Camazotz; Meg later goes back alone to free her little brother, armed with nothing but her love for him.

Anne of Green Gables is set in which Canadian province?

Prince Edward Island, author L. M. Montgomery's home, is the setting; orphan Anne Shirley is sent by mistake to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert's farm at Avonlea.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in which German city?

Bonn was Beethoven's home until he left for Vienna at 21; by the premiere of his Ninth Symphony there he was almost totally deaf, and a second conductor led the players.

Mozart was born in 1756 in which city?

Salzburg is where Mozart was composing by the age of five; his father Leopold soon took the young prodigy on tour to play for Europe's royal courts.

Which Dutch painter made some 860 oil paintings in about a decade?

Vincent van Gogh died in 1890, and his sister-in-law Johanna took up his cause: she put his paintings into exhibitions and, in 1914, published his letters to his brother.

Picasso's painting Guernica protests a bombing during which war?

The Spanish Civil War: German warplanes sent to help Franco bombed the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937, and Picasso painted his vast mural in answer that same year.

Who founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894?

Pierre de Coubertin, a French baron, also drew the five-ring symbol in 1913; at his own wish, his heart was laid to rest at ancient Olympia in Greece.

Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith in which city?

Springfield, Massachusetts: Naismith, a Canadian-born teacher at the YMCA training school there, asked the janitor for two boxes to use as goals and was handed peach baskets instead.

Which man is known as the 'Father of American Football' for rules he drew up from 1880?

Walter Camp, a Yale player and coach, turned rugby into a new sport: he replaced the scrum with a line of scrimmage, then required a team to gain five yards in three downs.

Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented a way to mass-produce what?

Movable type for printing: Gutenberg cast metal letters that could be set, inked, then rearranged for the next page, so books no longer had to be copied out by hand.

Cai Lun, an official at China's Han court, is credited with perfecting which material around 105 CE?

Paper: in 105 CE Cai Lun improved the recipe with tree bark, hemp and old rags, but older scraps show paper already existed, so he perfected the craft rather than invented it.

What colour is blood with its cells removed?

Pale yellow: with the cells taken out, what is left is about 92% water carrying proteins, salts and hormones; the red belongs to the cells.

Gold's chemical symbol Au comes from which Latin word?

Aurum is Latin for gold: chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius built today's symbols from the elements' Latin names, which is why silver is Ag and iron is Fe.

Diamond is a mineral form of which element?

Diamond is pure carbon, its atoms bonded in a rigid lattice that makes it the hardest natural material; graphite is another solid form of the same element.

Which element is the lightest and most abundant in the universe?

Hydrogen makes up about three-quarters of all ordinary matter; stars such as the Sun are mostly made of it and shine by fusing it into helium.

What determines which chemical element an atom is?

Its number of protons: every atom with 11 is sodium and every atom with 29 is copper, however many neutrons or electrons it carries.

Which four bases make up the 'letters' of DNA?

Cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine always pair C with G and A with T, so when the two strands separate, each one carries the pattern for rebuilding its partner.

Which is the only human disease to have been wiped out worldwide by vaccination?

Smallpox had killed people for at least 3,000 years; vaccination teams chased it down country by country until the last natural case, in Somalia in 1977, and victory was declared in 1980.

Which of the metric system's seven base units measures time?

The second was once a fixed slice of the Earth's daily spin; since 1967 it has been defined by the far steadier vibrations of caesium atoms.

The Celsius scale is named after an astronomer from which country?

Anders Celsius of Uppsala, Sweden, set out his scale in 1742 upside down by today's standards, with water boiling at 0 and freezing at 100; it was flipped only later.

Which temperature scale starts at absolute zero, the coldest that anything can get?

Kelvin starts at absolute zero, about −273 °C, so the scale never needs a negative number: nothing can be colder than its zero.

Which line around the Earth is about 40,075 km long?

The Equator is about 67 km longer than a loop through the poles, because Earth's spin makes the planet bulge around its middle.

In the usual seven-continent model, which continent is the second largest by area?

Africa covers about 30 million square km, second only to Asia; flat Mercator maps hide this, drawing Greenland about as large when Africa is really 14 times bigger.

Which organ is the largest in the human body?

The skin of an adult covers about two square metres and outweighs every other organ; the liver, a common guess, is only the largest organ inside the body.