50 Fun Facts About Sixth Grade

The name Mesopotamia means the land 'between' what?

Two rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates. Little rain falls on the plain between them, so its farmers dug canals to water their fields, and the harvests fed some of the world's first cities.

Which ancient people developed cuneiform, one of the world's first writing systems?

The Sumerians first pressed marks into wet clay to keep count of goods such as grain and sheep, and those tallies grew into a script that could carry letters, hymns and epics.

The Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest written law codes, comes from which region?

Ancient Mesopotamia. The Babylonian king's code laid down 'an eye for an eye', but only between equals: a man who blinded someone of lower rank paid a fine instead.

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic and which language?

Ancient Greek. Scholars could still read it, so the Greek text became the crib that let Jean-François Champollion work out the hieroglyphs in 1822.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built as a tomb for which pharaoh, also known as Cheops?

Khufu's tomb was built not by slaves, as the ancient Greeks later believed, but by thousands of Egyptian labourers working for their king.

Which Greek city-state is credited with founding the world's first democracy?

Athens let every male citizen vote on its laws in person at an open-air assembly, but women, slaves and foreign residents had no say.

The Parthenon, the great temple on the Acropolis, was dedicated to which goddess?

Athena. Her temple later served as a church and then a mosque, and was blown apart in 1687 when a Venetian shell hit the gunpowder that Ottoman troops had stored inside.

The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years at Olympia in honour of which god?

Zeus. Before each festival a sacred truce was proclaimed, so that athletes and spectators could travel to Olympia and home again in safety.

Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC on a date known as what?

The Ides of March was the Roman name for 15 March. The senators who stabbed Caesar hoped to save the Republic, but the wars that followed left his heir Octavian as Rome's first emperor.

According to legend, which twins founded Rome in 753 BC?

Romulus and Remus, the story goes, were left to die by the Tiber, suckled by a she-wolf and raised by a shepherd; in the best-known telling Romulus later killed his brother and named the city for himself.

Which dynasty built the brick-and-stone stretches of the Great Wall of China that visitors walk today?

The Ming. Earlier walls were mostly pounded earth and little of them survives; the Ming rebuilt the frontier in brick and stone and studded it with watchtowers.

The Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 by farmers doing what?

Digging a well, they broke into a pit holding some of the more than 8,000 clay soldiers buried to guard the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in the afterlife.

Which layer of the Earth is the thickest?

The mantle is about 2,900 km thick and fills most of the planet's volume; it is almost entirely solid rock, yet over millions of years it flows like a very thick liquid.

Earth's inner core is a solid ball made mostly of iron and which other metal?

Nickel. Immense pressure keeps the inner core solid, while the liquid outer core around it swirls as the planet spins and generates Earth's magnetic field.

Which scientist proposed the idea of continental drift in 1912?

Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist, and leading geologists dismissed him as an outsider; his idea won acceptance only decades after his death, reborn as plate tectonics.

What name is given to the belt where most of the world's volcanoes and earthquakes occur?

The Ring of Fire rims the Pacific Ocean, where sea-floor plates slide beneath their neighbours and melt, feeding volcanoes from New Zealand round to the tip of South America.

In the water cycle, what is the name for water vapour turning back into liquid droplets to form clouds?

Condensation happens when rising air cools and its water vapour gathers on tiny specks of dust or salt; the same process beads water on a cold glass on a humid day.

Which glassy, usually black rock forms when lava cools too quickly for crystals to grow?

Obsidian is volcanic glass, and it breaks into edges so sharp that Stone Age people made blades and arrowheads from it.

Marble forms when heat and pressure transform which rock, itself built largely from seashells and coral?

Limestone. Under heat and pressure its calcite recrystallises into a mass of interlocking crystals, and stray minerals such as clay or iron oxides become the veins in the marble.

Which gas do plants take in from the air to carry out photosynthesis?

Carbon dioxide and water are the raw materials: with energy from sunlight the plant turns them into sugar and releases oxygen as a leftover.

Why do most plant leaves look green?

Chlorophyll reflects that light: the pigment soaks up red and blue light to power the plant and bounces most of the green back, so leaves show the colour they use least.

Which part of the cell holds the chromosomes and DNA?

The nucleus is the cell's control room, yet human red blood cells manage without one: they push theirs out as they mature, leaving more room to carry oxygen.

Which two structures do plant cells have that animal cells lack?

A cell wall and chloroplasts. The cellulose wall gives plants their stiffness, all the way up to a tree trunk, and the chloroplasts capture the Sun's energy.

In a food chain, what are the plants and algae at the very bottom called?

Producers make their own food from sunlight, and everything above depends on them; only about a tenth of the energy at each level passes up to the next, so chains rarely run past five links.

Which planet orbits just inside the asteroid belt?

Mars. The belt beyond it is far emptier than its name suggests: all its asteroids together have less mass than the Moon, and spacecraft have crossed it without incident.

Which planet has more mass than all the other planets in the Solar System combined?

Jupiter is more than twice as massive as all the other planets put together, yet the Sun dwarfs them all, holding 99.8% of the Solar System's mass.

Using the order of operations, what is 1 - 2 x 3^4?

-161. The exponent comes first (3^4 = 81), then the multiplication (2 x 81 = 162), then the subtraction (1 - 162); subtracting first instead would give -81.

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

Parentheses come first because they let the writer overrule the usual order: 1 + 2 x 3 is 7, but (1 + 2) x 3 is 9.

Which of these numbers is prime?

29 has no factors but 1 and itself, while 21 = 3 x 7, 25 = 5 x 5 and 27 = 3 x 9; Euclid proved around 300 BC that the primes never run out.

The word 'percent' comes from Latin words meaning what?

By a hundred: the Latin is per centum, so 45% means 45 for every hundred, which is why shifting the decimal point two places turns it into 0.45.

In simplest form, what is the ratio of oranges to lemons in a bowl of eight oranges and six lemons?

4:3. Divide both numbers by 2, the biggest factor they share; the order matters, because 3:4 would be the ratio of lemons to oranges.

What do you get when you multiply two negative numbers together?

A positive number. Think of debts: cancel two debts of $5 each and you are $10 better off, so -2 x -5 = +10.

What is the formula for the area of a triangle?

Half of base times height works because any triangle is exactly half of a parallelogram with the same base and height: join two copies and you get one.

Which is the largest continent by both area and population?

Asia holds nearly six in ten people on Earth, so many in its south and east that a single circle drawn there, covering a tenth of the globe, contains more than half of humanity.

Which river carries more water than any other on Earth?

The Amazon is usually ranked just behind the Nile for length, but nothing rivals its volume: it carries about a fifth of all the river water that reaches the sea.

The Nile's two main branches, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, meet at which capital city?

Khartoum. The White Nile is the longer branch, yet the Blue Nile, fed by summer rains in Ethiopia's highlands, brings far more of the water.

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

China. The neighbours long disagreed on its height, Nepal counting the snow cap and China only the rock beneath, until they announced a joint figure of 8,848.86 metres in 2020.

The US Constitution divides the government into how many branches?

Three: Congress makes the laws, the president carries them out and the courts interpret them, a split designed so that no person or group holds too much power.

US House seats are divided among the states according to what?

Population, counted by the census every ten years. A 1929 law capped the House at 435 seats, so a state can now gain a seat only if another loses one.

'Her smile was like sunshine' is an example of which figure of speech?

A simile compares two things using 'like' or 'as'; drop the 'like' and say 'her smile was sunshine' and it becomes a metaphor instead.

Words such as buzz, meow and hiccup, which imitate the sounds they describe, are examples of what?

Onomatopoeia changes from language to language even when the sound does not: a clock goes 'tick tock' in English but 'kachi kachi' in Japanese.

'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' is a classic example of which device?

Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound at the start of nearby words; pile up enough of them, as here with p, and the line becomes a tongue-twister.

In the sentence 'She sang loudly', which part of speech is 'loudly'?

An adverb describes how, when or where something happens, and many end in -ly, though not every -ly word is one: 'friendly' and 'lovely' are adjectives.

Percy Jackson discovers he is the son of which Greek god?

Poseidon. Rick Riordan made Percy up on the spot as a bedtime story for his son Haley, who then told him to write it down as a book.

Which R. J. Palacio novel follows Auggie Pullman, a boy with a facial difference, into fifth grade?

Wonder began with a moment its author regretted: when her small son cried at the sight of a girl with a facial difference, Palacio hurried her children away, and she started writing that night.

In the novel Hatchet, Brian is stranded alone after a plane crash in which country's wilderness?

Canada. Brian is flying north to visit his father when the pilot dies of a heart attack, leaving him alone in the wilderness with little more than the hatchet his mother gave him.

Which book series began in 2004 as daily entries on the educational website Funbrain?

Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Jeff Kinney had struggled to find a newspaper syndicate for his cartoons, so he posted Greg Heffley's journal online, and its success there won him a book deal.

In English, musical notes are named with letters running from A up to which letter?

G. After it the names start again at A, one octave higher; German musicians do use H, but as their name for the note English speakers call B.

In traditional art class colour theory, which three colours are the primary colours?

Red, yellow and blue are the painter's primaries, but screens mix red, green and blue light instead, and printers use cyan, magenta and yellow ink.

The Moon's surface gravity is roughly what fraction of Earth's?

One sixth, which is why astronauts in the Apollo footage seem to bounce: with so little weight to carry, a loping, hopping stride proved easier than walking.