99 Fun Facts About Tricky

What is the capital city of Australia?

Canberra: the constitution put the capital in New South Wales but at least 100 miles from Sydney, so a new city was built, and Parliament sat in Melbourne until it moved there in 1927.

Which African country has more ancient pyramids than Egypt?

Sudan: the kings of Kush, who ruled Egypt for a time as its 25th Dynasty, took up pyramid building at home, and their kingdom went on to raise more than 200 smaller, steeper tombs along the Nile.

How well does NASA say the naked eye can see the Great Wall from orbit?

Barely, and only in near-perfect conditions: the wall is built of local materials that match the land around it, and Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, reported that he could not see it.

Where does the image of Vikings wearing horned helmets mostly come from?

19th-century opera costumes: designer Carl Emil Doepler put horns on the helmets when Wagner's Ring cycle was staged in the 1870s, and the look stuck, though no horned helmet from the Viking Age has ever been dug up.

Botanically speaking, the peanut is what kind of plant?

A legume, in the same family as peas and beans: once a peanut flower is fertilised, a stalk called a peg grows down into the soil, and the pod ripens underground.

Which of these fruits is a berry in the strict botanical sense?

Banana: to a botanist a berry is a fleshy fruit grown from the single ovary of one flower, so bananas, grapes and tomatoes qualify, while strawberries and raspberries are clusters of many tiny fruits.

In 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled that, for tariff purposes, the tomato is what?

A vegetable: the justices agreed that a tomato is botanically a fruit, but held that the tariff law spoke as ordinary people do, and people serve tomatoes with the main course, not as dessert.

Experiments show that a goldfish's memory is best measured in what?

Months: goldfish fed at one side of a tank learn to wait there at mealtimes, and those taught a task can still repeat it months later, so the famous three-second memory is a myth.

Which of these is the largest desert on Earth?

Antarctica: a desert is defined by how little rain or snow falls, not by heat, and the frozen continent gets so little that it counts as one, about half as large again as the Sahara.

How did Albert Einstein actually perform in mathematics as a schoolboy?

He excelled well beyond his age: by his own account Einstein had mastered calculus before he was fifteen, and he laughed when shown a 1935 Ripley's column claiming he had failed maths.

In Mary Shelley's novel, who or what is Frankenstein?

The scientist: Victor Frankenstein is the university student who makes the creature, and in the novel that creature is no grunting brute but an eloquent giant who teaches himself to read Paradise Lost.

Strictly speaking, what is Big Ben?

The great bell: the tower that houses it has a name of its own, and since 2012 that has been the Elizabeth Tower, chosen by MPs to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.

What colour is an aircraft's 'black box' flight recorder?

Bright orange: the colour is there so that searchers can spot the recorder in wreckage, and for crashes at sea each unit also carries a beacon that signals from underwater.

In which country was the board game Chinese checkers invented?

Germany: the game came out there in 1892 as Stern-Halma, named for its star-shaped board, and only became 'Chinese checkers' in 1928, when a version was sold under that name in America.

In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the name for a Danish pastry translates as what?

Viennese bread: the Scandinavian name, wienerbrød, points back to Vienna, while Austrians return the compliment and call the same pastry a Kopenhagener, after Copenhagen.

Fortune cookies, a US Chinese-restaurant staple, most likely came from immigrants from where?

Japan: a very similar folded cracker was being baked around Kyoto in the 1800s, and a Japanese gardener in San Francisco is said to have served the first American ones in the early 1900s.

The koala is often called a bear, but it is actually what kind of animal?

A marsupial: the newborn finishes growing in its mother's pouch, and adults doze for most of the day because the toxic eucalyptus leaves they live on give so little energy.

The orca, or killer whale, is the largest member of which family?

Oceanic dolphins: the orca is a toothed whale and the biggest member of the dolphin family, which also takes in the pilot whales despite their name.

Which planet has the hottest surface in the solar system?

Venus: its thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, keeping the surface above 460 °C, hotter even than Mercury, which orbits far closer to the Sun.

What does a camel actually store in its hump?

Fat: the hump is a food reserve, not a water tank, and when a camel goes a long time without eating it burns through the store until the hump sags and flops to one side.

Which Scarlett Johansson film is built on the myth that people use only 10% of their brains?

Lucy: its poster claimed the average person uses 10% of their brain capacity, but neurologists say we use virtually every part of the brain, and most of it is active almost all the time.

What is the actual risk from the poinsettia, the red-leaved Christmas plant, to children and pets?

Essentially none: the plant's milky sap can irritate the mouth or upset the stomach, but poison experts say eating it has little if any effect beyond that, and it is not fatal.

The myth of lemming mass suicide was cemented by staged footage in a 1958 documentary from which studio?

Walt Disney: for White Wilderness the crew set a small group of lemmings running on a turntable to fake a migration, then shoved them off a cliff to stage the plunge into the sea.

Legend wrongly credits Thomas Crapper with inventing what?

The flush toilet: Crapper ran a London plumbing firm and took out nine patents, but none was for the toilet itself, and a flushing mechanism had been patented in 1775, decades before he was born.

Which work is the earliest known source of 'let them eat cake', usually pinned on Marie Antoinette?

Rousseau's Confessions, written in the 1760s when Marie Antoinette was still a child, gives the line to an unnamed 'great princess', and what she tells the hungry poor to eat is brioche.

What did educated Europeans in Columbus's time generally believe about the shape of the Earth?

That it was a sphere: the real quarrel with Columbus was over the globe's size, which he badly underestimated, and the flat-Earth tale was spread centuries later by Washington Irving's 1828 biography of him.

How were the nineteen people executed as witches at Salem in 1692 put to death?

Hanged: all nineteen died on the gallows and nobody was burned, though one more man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death under heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea.

Which US president is the only one to have spoken English as a second language?

Martin Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch in Kinderhook, New York, and learned English at school, yet he was also the first president born a US citizen and not a British subject.

Bombay duck, a pungent dried delicacy of Anglo-Indian cooking, is what?

A fish: the bummalo, a lizardfish caught off Mumbai, is dried in the sun until pungent, then fried and crumbled over a meal as a condiment.

Guinea pigs, which are not pigs at all, were first domesticated where?

The Andes of South America: people there bred guinea pigs for meat long before Europeans made pets of them, and households in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia still raise them for the table.

The digits 0 to 9, often called Arabic numerals, were invented where?

India: Europe learned the system from the Arabic writings of mathematicians such as al-Khwarizmi, so Europeans named the digits after their teachers and not their inventors.

Which African bird, once thought to come from Turkey, did the English call a turkey before the American one?

The guineafowl was England's turkey-cock by the 1540s, and the name soon passed to the American bird, probably because the two were confused; the turkey's Latin name, Meleagris, is an ancient word for guineafowl.

The Hundred Years' War, which really lasted 116 years, was fought between England and which kingdom?

France: historians date the war from 1337 to 1453, but it was a stop-start run of separate conflicts broken by long truces, and its tidy name was only given to it by later historians.

In which month of the modern Gregorian calendar did Russia's October Revolution take place?

November: Russia still ran on the Julian calendar, which had fallen 13 days behind the Gregorian one used in the West, so its 25 October was 7 November there.

What did Abner Doubleday, wrongly named baseball's inventor years after his death, actually do for a living?

Army officer: Doubleday commanded the gunners who fired the Union's first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, and he went on to fight at Gettysburg as a general.

Catgut, once used for violin strings, is usually made from the intestines of which animals?

Sheep and goats: their gut is twisted and dried into cord, and cats never came into it, because the name is perhaps a slip for 'kitgut', from kit, an old word for a small fiddle.

Which ingredient of milk and dark chocolate is left out of white chocolate?

Cocoa solids: white chocolate keeps the pale cocoa butter pressed from the bean but leaves out the dark part of the cocoa, which is why it stays ivory and never turns brown.

Why is a bullfighter's muleta red?

Tradition, and to hide bloodstains: bulls are colour-blind to red and charge the matador's other cape, which is magenta, just as hard, because it is the movement that provokes them.

What is the most common reason a chameleon changes colour?

Social signalling and temperature: a chameleon usually shifts colour to stand out, brightening to court a mate or face down a rival, and it darkens when cold because dark skin soaks up more heat.

What colour is deoxygenated blood inside your veins?

Dark red: human blood darkens as it gives up oxygen but stays red, while some crustaceans really are blue-blooded, thanks to a copper-based pigment that turns blue when it carries oxygen.

Which effect is wrongly said to make sinks drain opposite ways in each hemisphere?

The Coriolis effect really does set cyclones turning opposite ways in the two hemispheres, but over a sink it is far too weak, and stray motion in the water decides which way it drains.

Measured from base to peak rather than from sea level, which mountain is Earth's tallest?

Mauna Kea: the Hawaiian volcano stands only about 4,200 m above the sea, but it rises from the floor of the Pacific, and from base to peak it outstrips Everest's height above sea level.

Which mountain's summit is the farthest point on Earth's surface from the centre of the Earth?

Chimborazo: Earth bulges at the equator and this Ecuadorian volcano stands just one degree south of it, so its summit lies about two kilometres farther from Earth's centre than Everest's.

Which is the most densely populated country in the world?

Monaco: about 38,000 people share roughly two square kilometres of the Riviera, so the principality makes room by building out into the sea, most recently with a new district opened in 2024.

Which is the only country in the world with a population under 1,000?

Vatican City: fewer than a thousand people live in the tiny enclave inside Rome, which Italy recognised as a sovereign state in 1929 so that the pope could act independently of any government.

What was Cleopatra's first language?

Koine Greek: her dynasty descended from Ptolemy, a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great, and in nearly three centuries on the throne she was the only one of the line to learn Egyptian.

In which country did German chocolate cake originate?

United States: the cake is named for Samuel German, who created a sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's company in the 1850s, and it took off in 1957 when a Texas homemaker's recipe ran in a Dallas newspaper.

Contrary to the schoolroom 'tongue map', what does research show about the tongue?

Every region can sense every taste: the map grew out of a 1942 Harvard chart of a 1901 German study, in which areas found to be slightly less sensitive were misread as having no sensitivity at all.

Chop suey, often called an American invention, takes its name from a phrase in which Chinese language?

Cantonese: tsap seui means 'odds and ends', and the dish has been traced to Guangdong, the southern province that many of the first Chinese immigrants to America had left.

Olympic gold medals, which need only six grams of gold plating, are made mostly of which metal?

Silver makes up at least 92.5% of every Olympic gold medal, under a thin coat of gold. The last solid-gold medals were awarded at the 1912 Games in Stockholm.

Hawaiian pizza, topped with ham and pineapple, was invented in 1962 at a restaurant in which country?

Canada gave the world Hawaiian pizza: Sam Panopoulos first served it at his Satellite Restaurant in Ontario, and was still defending it to reporters in retirement.

Caesar salad, named after restaurateur Caesar Cardini rather than any Roman, was first tossed in which country?

Mexico is the salad's home: Cardini is credited with improvising it in Tijuana on 4 July 1924, when a holiday rush emptied his kitchen. His diners were dodging Prohibition.

Bamboo, which can grow over 40 metres tall on woody stems, belongs to which plant family?

Grasses count the giant bamboos as their largest members. Like wheat or lawn turf, bamboo has stems that are hollow between the joints.

Which star in the constellation Canis Major is the brightest in Earth's night sky?

Sirius is almost twice as bright as Canopus, the runner-up, helped by lying just 8.6 light-years from Earth.

Which adopted heir of a murdered dictator became the first Roman emperor in 27 BC?

Augustus, born Gaius Octavius, founded the Roman Empire and ruled it until AD 14. Julius Caesar, his great-uncle, was a dictator but never an emperor.

The Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's final defeat in 1815, was fought in which present-day country?

Belgium is where Waterloo lies today, about 15 km south of Brussels, but in 1815 the village belonged to the kingdom of the Netherlands.

Abraham Lincoln, the president Illinois claims as its own, was born in a log cabin in which state?

Kentucky was Lincoln's birthplace, on a farm near Hodgenville in 1809. His family moved to Indiana in 1816, and he reached Illinois only in 1830, aged 21.

The so-called lead in a pencil, which has never contained lead, is clay mixed with which form of carbon?

Graphite was mistaken for a lead ore when it was first mined, and the wrong name stuck. Blending it with clay, a method from 1795, lets makers set how hard a pencil writes.

Which organ, making up roughly 16% of body mass, is the largest in the human body?

Skin is an organ in its own right and outweighs all the others. The liver, the usual guess, is only the heaviest organ inside the body.

Which gas makes up about 78% of the dry air in Earth's atmosphere, almost four times any other?

Nitrogen fills 78% of dry air, while the oxygen that keeps people alive is only about 21%. Argon, at under 1%, comes a distant third.

Which video game giant was founded in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of handmade playing cards?

Nintendo began with hanafuda, hand-printed flower cards, the trade of its founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, long before any of its games needed a screen.

Which children's modelling compound was first sold in the 1930s as a putty for cleaning wallpaper?

Play-Doh began as a cleaner for soot-stained wallpaper, until a nursery teacher saw that children could model with it. She and her husband gave it its name.

Which toy company makes so many tiny rubber tyres that it can claim to be the world's biggest tyre manufacturer?

Lego was turning out about 306 million miniature tyres a year by 2006, more by number than any maker of full-sized ones.

Which power tool began as a surgical instrument that 1780s doctors devised for obstructed childbirth?

Chainsaw history starts with a fine serrated chain, worked by hand between two handles, that two doctors used to cut bone, including the pelvis in a blocked labour.

The Panama hat, made famous when Theodore Roosevelt wore one at the canal, originated in which country?

Ecuador has always woven the hats; they took their name from the isthmus where they were shipped and sold to the rest of the world.

Which bird, diving at over 300 km/h, is far faster than the cheetah and every other animal on Earth?

The peregrine falcon climbs high, then folds into a steep hunting dive called a stoop; one bird was clocked at 389 km/h.

The Canary Islands take their name from a Latin phrase meaning 'islands of' which animals?

Dogs is the meaning of the Latin name Canariae Insulae; Pliny the Elder wrote that one island teemed with very large ones. The songbird was later named after the islands.

Which country adopted the unicorn, mythical enemy of the English lion, to support its royal coat of arms?

Scotland put two unicorns on its royal arms, a beast that legend made the natural enemy of the lion. One still faces England's lion on the UK arms.

The saxophone, though usually made of metal, belongs to which family of musical instruments?

Woodwind status comes from how the sound is made, not the material: a saxophone is blown through a single reed on its mouthpiece, like a clarinet.

In which month does Earth reach perihelion, the point of its orbit closest to the Sun?

January puts Earth about 5 million km closer to the Sun than July does. The north still shivers because seasons come from the planet's tilt, not its distance.

Which Asian country's flag, made of two stacked pennants, is the only national one that is not four-sided?

Nepal joined the pennons of two rival branches of its ruling dynasty into one flag, which is also the only national flag taller than it is wide.

In The Legend of Zelda video games, what is the name of the green-capped hero the player usually controls?

Link is the sword-wielding hero, while Zelda is the princess of the title. He wears green because the first game allowed only three colours and was set mostly in a forest.

Which character, maker of the One Ring, is the lord in the title of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings?

Sauron forged the One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power, so the title names the story's villain rather than Frodo or any of its heroes.

Whose portrait has appeared on the front of the US $100 bill since 1914?

Benjamin Franklin was a printer, inventor and diplomat but never president, just like Alexander Hamilton, the face of the $10 bill.

Which US president, not George Washington, became the first to live in the White House in 1800?

John Adams moved into the nearly completed President's Mansion late in 1800, four months before he left office. No president before him ever lived there.

Which film giant, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012, built the first handheld digital camera back in 1975?

Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the battery-powered prototype around a black-and-white sensor of just 10,000 pixels.

Ferruccio Lamborghini founded his first company in 1948 to build which machines, years before his supercars?

Tractors made Lamborghini's name first: his early models were pieced together from discarded war materials, including military truck engines.

Which two airmen flew the Atlantic nonstop in 1919, eight years before Charles Lindbergh's solo crossing?

Alcock and Brown flew a modified Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland in under 16 hours, and Winston Churchill handed them the £10,000 prize.

Easter Island, famous for its giant stone moai statues, is a special territory of which country?

Chile annexed the island in 1888, even though the nearest point of its mainland lies about 3,500 km away across the Pacific.

Che Guevara, the face of the Cuban Revolution, was born in the city of Rosario in which country?

Argentina was Guevara's birthplace; Cuba's new government later declared him a Cuban citizen by birth to honour his part in its victory.

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769 on which Mediterranean island, a year after Genoa ceded it?

Corsica had passed out of Genoese hands only a year before; Napoleon, from a family of Italian origin, left the island for the mainland in 1779.

Which British queen was baptised Alexandrina, after a Russian tsar, but reigned under her second name?

Victoria was named Alexandrina for her godfather, Tsar Alexander I. Papers from the first day of her reign used both names, until she had the first one dropped.

Which US state is at once the northernmost, the westernmost and, by longitude, the easternmost of all fifty?

Alaska's Aleutian Islands stretch so far west that they cross into the Eastern Hemisphere, giving the state the most easterly longitude in the nation.

A ship passing through the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific travels in which general direction?

Southeast is the surprise heading: the isthmus bends at that point, so the canal's Atlantic entrance actually lies to the west of its Pacific one.

Which country star wrote I Will Always Love You, later a 14-week US number one for Whitney Houston?

Dolly Parton wrote it in 1973 as a farewell to her mentor Porter Wagoner, and later refused to give Elvis Presley half the publishing rights to record it.

Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics honoured his work on which phenomenon, rather than relativity?

The photoelectric effect won him the prize because some physicists still viewed relativity with scepticism, and the 1921 award reached him a year late, in 1922.

Which Nobel category was not in Alfred Nobel's will and was created by Sweden's central bank in 1968?

Economics joined the original five prizes when the Sveriges Riksbank funded an award to mark its 300th anniversary; it was first given in 1969.

The Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, defined in 1854, concerns the conception of which person?

The Virgin Mary, the doctrine holds, was free of original sin from the moment her own mother conceived her. It is a separate teaching from the virgin birth of Jesus.

Which large African mammal, once classed with pigs, is the closest living relative of whales?

The hippopotamus split from the ancestors of whales about 55 million years ago; until 1909 naturalists grouped it with pigs because of its teeth.

Fireflies, also known as lightning bugs, are soft-bodied members of which order of insects?

Beetles they are, more than 2,400 species of them, and every firefly glows as a larva, a warning to predators that it tastes bad.

Most wasabi paste served with sushi outside its homeland is really which cheaper plant, dyed green?

Horseradish, mixed with mustard, starch and green colouring, stands in for real wasabi, a plant so hard to farm that few places can grow it at scale.

Welsh rabbit, a dish first recorded in 1725 and later respelled rarebit, is toast topped with a sauce of what?

Cheese, melted with ale or mustard, is all the 'rabbit' there is; the name was probably a joke, and 'rarebit' is a later corruption of it.

Mongolian barbecue, which owes nothing to Mongolian cooking, was created in the 1950s on which island?

Taiwan is where comedian and restaurateur Wu Zhaonan, who had fled Beijing, opened his grill stall in Taipei in 1951.

Which creatures became the first animals sent into space, aboard a captured V-2 rocket launched in 1947?

Fruit flies rode the rocket so that researchers could study radiation exposure at high altitude, and they were recovered alive. Primates followed in 1949.

Before pumpkins took over, Halloween lanterns in Ireland and Britain were carved from which root crops?

Turnips were hollowed out and given grotesque faces; Irish legend has Stingy Jack doomed to roam the Earth with only one of them to light his way.

Britain's wartime story that carrots gave its pilots night vision was spread to hide which new technology?

Radar was what really let British pilots fight at night; praising carrots kept the new sets secret, and the eyesight myth has outlived the war.

Which sea, bounded by four Atlantic currents instead of coasts, is the only one with no land boundary?

The Sargasso Sea is named after the Sargassum seaweed that floats across it, and European eels swim the width of the ocean to breed there.

The Y in mock-antique signs such as Ye Olde Shoppe stands in for which lost English letter, said as 'th'?

Thorn had no piece of type in the sets early English printers imported, so they reached for Y instead; the word was still always pronounced 'the'.

Which language, common across Roman Judaea, do most scholars think Jesus used for everyday speech and teaching?

Aramaic was the common tongue of Roman Judaea and of at least some of the disciples; the consensus is that Jesus probably knew Hebrew as well.