Do you know...

Are you sophisticated? This is a great question that everybody thinks they have real answers to, but you know what, you are sophisticated but not so sophisticated as knowing everything, right? After going through this separate list, you will be half way to being sophisticated.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth.
Every person has a unique tongue print.
Approximately two-thirds of a person's body weight is water. Blood is 92% water.
The brain is 75% water and muscles are 75% water.
Your middle fingernail grows the fastest.
Nigerians are the strongest people in the world.
Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails.
A typical athlete's heart churns out 25 to 30 litres (up to 8 gallons) of blood per minute.
The first human sex change took place in 1950 when Danish doctor Christian Hamburger
operated on New Yorker George Jargensen, who became Christine Jargensen.
Men loose about 40 hairs a day. Women loose about 70 hairs a day.
A person can live without food for about a month, but only about a week without water.
55% of people yawn within 5 minutes of seeing someone else yawn.
It is impossible to sneeze and keep one's eyes open at the same time.
Einstein's brain was of average size (1375 grams - 49oz).
The human head contains 22 bones. More on the head and brains
On average, you breathe 23,000 times a day.
The tongue of a blue whale is as long as an elephant
The tallest nation in the world is the Watusis of Burundi.

Is a world population of 6 billion too many? Compare that with animals. There are more than a million animal species. There are 6,000 species of reptiles, 73,000 kinds of spiders, and 3,000 types of lice. For each person there is about 200 million insects. The 4,600 kinds of mammals represent a mere 0,3% of animals and the 9000 kinds of birds only 0,7%. The most numerous bird species is the red-billed quelea of southern Africa. There are an estimated 100 trillion of them.

A house fly lives only 14 days.

African elephants only have four teeth to chew their food with.

The oldest breed of dog is the Saluki.

An ostrich can run up to 43mph (70 km/h).

An annoyed camel will spit at a person.

The pig is rated the fourth most intelligent animal but are mentioned only twice in the Bible

Pork is the world's most widely-eaten meat.

Dinosaurs did not eat grass: there weren't any at that time.

A giraffe can clean its ears with its 50cm (20 in) tongue.

The sailfish is the fastest swimmer, reaching 68 mph (109 km/h), although a black marlin has been clocked at 80 mph (128 km/h).

The slowest fish is the Sea Horse, which moves along at about 0.01 mph (0.016 km/h).

The heart of a blue whale is the size of a small car.

Sharks are immune to all known diseases.

There are about 54 million dogs in the US, and Paris is said to have more dogs than people.

Millions of trees are accidentally planted by squirrels who bury nuts and then forget where they hid them.

New Zealand is home to 4 million people and 70 million sheep.

The $ sign was designed in 1788 by Oliver Pollock.
Money notes are not made from paper, it is made mostly from a special blend of cotton and linen.
The first credit card was issued by American Express in 1951.
Statistics show that people with high, medium and low income groups spend about the same amount on Christmas gifts.
80% of millionaires drive second-hand cars.
In 1900, the price of gold was less than $40 per ounce. It reached $600 in 1930, now struggling to reach $400 per ounce.
Tobacco is a $200 billion industry, producing six trillion cigarettes a year - about 1,000 cigarettes for each person on earth.
The NASDAQ stock exchange was totally disabled in on day in December 1987 when a squirrel burrowed through a telephone line.
In 1990, the word "recession" appeared in 1,583 articles in The Wall Street Journal.
Global sales of pre-recorded music total more than $40 billion.
Tourism is the world's biggest industry, affecting 240 million jobs.
In 1865, Frederik Idestam founded a wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, naming it Nokia. It rapidly gained worldwide recognition, attracting a large number of workforce and the town Nokia was born. In 1898, the Finnish Rubber Works company opened in Nokia, taking on the town name in the 1920s. After WWII, the rubber company took a majority shareholding in the Finnish Cable Work. In 1967, the companies consolidated to become the Nokia Group. The recession of the 1990s led the group to focus on the mobile phone market.

About 50 Bibles are sold every minute.
Christianity is the world's most widespread religion (2.1 billion Christians - see list of largest religions).
There are about 34,000 Christian denominations in the world.
The Bible was written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek.
John was the only apostle who witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus.
Delilah was given a few thousand pieces of silver to deceive Samson into revealing the secret of his strength. (NKJV) Judges 16:4-5: "And the lords of the Philistines came up to her and said to her, 'Entice him, and find out where his great strength lies, and by what means we may over power him....and every one of us will give you 1100 pieces of silver.' "
The word "Christian" appears only three times in the Bible: Acts 11:26; 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16.
There are 66 books in the Bible, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament.
The 66 books of the Bible is divided into 1,189 chapters consisting of 31,173 verses. The Old Testament has 929 chapters, the New Testament 260. (King James version)
The longest line in the Bible is Esther 8:9 - 89 words, 425 letters.
The longest word in the Bible is Maher-shalal-hash-baz: Isaiah 8:1.
The shortest verse in the NIV Bible is John 11:35: "Jesus wept."
The chapter in the exact middle of the Bible is Psalm 117; there are 594 chapters before Psalm 117 and 594 chapters after Psalm 117.
St Paul wrote 14 (of the 27) books of the New Testament.
The covering for the tabernacle was made out of ram skins and sea cow hides: Exodus 36:19.
The word "Lord" appears 1855 times in the Bible.
The word "God" appears in every book except Esther and Song of Solomon.
Seven suicides are recorded in the Bible.
Methuselah is the oldest man on record: 969 years old (Genesis 5:27).
Of the 1.5 billion Islam followers, 1 billion follow Sunni Islam. Shi'ite Muslims number approximately 125 million.
During the 6th Century, it was customary to congratulate people who sneezed because it was thought that they were expelling evil from their bodies. During the great plague of Europe, the Pope passed a law to say "God bless you" to one who sneezed.
The 7 Fathers of the Church:
St Athanasius, St Gregory of Nazianzus, St John Chrysostom, St John of Damascus, St Basil of Caesarea, St Gregory of Nyssa, St Cyril of Alexandria.
The last word in the Bible is AMEN.

India is the world's largest democracy with more than 600 million voters.
The system of democracy was introduced 2 500 years ago in Athens, Greece.
The United Nations organisation (UN) was founded in 1945.
Bolivia holds the highest turnover of governments. Since their independence from Spain in 1825, Bolivia has had almost 200 governments. Since 1945, Italy saw more than 50 governments and more than 20 Prime Ministers.
The European Union was founded in 1957 as the European Economic Community. It then became the EC (European Community) and in 1993 the EU (European Union).
The United State of America was colonized by seven countries.
Egypt as a country was not colonized by any country of the world.

Fishing is the biggest participant sports in the world.
Football (soccer) is the most attended or watched sport in the world.
Boxing became a legal sport in 1901.
More than 100 million people hold hunting licences.
The record for the most Olympic medals ever won is held by Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina. Competing in three Olympics, between 1956 and 1964, she won 18 medals.
The first instance of global electronic communications took place in 1871 when news of the Derby winner was telegraphed from London to Calcutta in under 5 minutes.
The very first Olympic race, held in 776 BC, was won by Corubus, a chef.
The high jump method of jumping head first and landing on the back is called the Fosbury Flop.
About 42,000 tennis balls are used in the plus-minus 650 matches in the Wimbledon Championship.
A baseball ball has exactly 108 stitches, a cricket ball has between 65 and 70 stiches.
A soccer ball is made up of 32 leather panels, held together by 642 stitches.
Golf the only sport played on the moon - on 6 February 1971 Alan Shepard hit a golf ball.
Volleyball was invented by William George Morgan of Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1895.
A badminton shuttle easily travels 180 km/h (112 mph).
Ferenc Szisz from Romania, driving a Renault, won the first Formula One Grand Prix held at Le Mans, France in 1906.

China has the most TV sets (300 million).
Today there are more than 1,5 billion TV sets in use.
US citizens watch the most TV. By age 65, an American would have watched the equivalent of 9 years uninterrupted screening, viewing more than 20,000 TV commercials per year.
In the US there are more TV sets than telephones.
The first daily broadcast was started by the BBC in November 1936.
It will take a person more than 400 years to watch all the videos on YouTube.
In Terminator 2 - Judgement Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger received a salary of $15 million; the 700 words he spoke translates to $21,429 per word. "Hasta la vista, baby" thus cost $85,716.
The largest movie theatre in the world, Radio City Music Hall in New York, opened in 1932 - it seats almost 6,000 people.
The longest movie in the world according to Guiness World Records is The Cure for Insomnia, directed by John Henry Timmis IV. Released in 1987, the running time is 5220 minutes (87 hours).
The first film animation was "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" made in 1906 by American J. Stuart Blacton.
The Walt Disney company was founded in 1923, and in 1927 Walt came up with the idea for an animated mouse called Mortimer Mouse. His wife Lillian convinced him to change it to Mickey Mouse.
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, created Tom and Jerry in 1939.
The video recording machine was invented by the Ampex corporation of California in 1956. The first video recorder, the Ampex VR1000, stood 1,1 m (3 ft 3 in) high and weighed as much as a small car: 665 kg (1,466 lb).
The home video recorder was introduced in 1972 by Philips of the Netherlands.
Japanese company JVC introduced the VHS system in 1976.
About one quarter of movie videos sold are animations.
The longest kiss in a movie is in Andy Warhol's Kiss. Rufus Collins and Naomi Levine kissed for the entire 50 minutes of the movie.

Why does wet fabric appear darker?

When fabric gets wet, light coming towards it refracts within the water, dispersing the light. In addition, the surface of the water causes incoherent light scattering. The combination of these two effects causes less light to reflect to your eyes and makes the wet fabric appear darker.

Why does water not calm the tongue after eating hot spicy food?

The spices in most of the hot foods that we eat are oily, and, like your elementary school science teacher taught you, oil and water don't mix. In this case, the water just rolls over the oily spices. What can you do to calm your aching tongue? Eat bread. The bread will absorb the oily spices. A second solution is to drink milk. Milk contains a substance called "casein" which will bind to the spices and carry them away. Alcohol also dissolves oily spices.

Why is blue for boys and pink for girls?

In ancient times, it was believed that certain colors could combat the evil spirits that lingered over nurseries. Because blue was associated with the heavenly spirits, boys were clothed in that colour, boys then being considered the most valuable resource to parents. Although baby girls did not have a colour associated with them, they were mostly clothed in black. It was only in the Middle Ages when pink became associated with baby girls.

Why do people kiss under the mistletoe at Christmas?

In ancient myth, when the son of the Norse goddess Frigga was killed by an arrow made of mistletoe and then brought back to life, she blessed the mistletoe and bestowed a kiss on all who passed beneath it. In the 18th century, the legend was adopted as a promise to marry. At Christmas a lady standing under a mistletoe may not refuse a kiss. If she does, she cannot expect to marry the following year. So it is told.

Why are there bunnies and eggs at Easter?

The ancient Anglo-Saxons celebrated the return of spring with a carnival commemorating their goddess of offspring and of springtime, Eostre. The word carnival possibly originated from the Latin 'carne vale' meaning "flesh, farewell" or "meat, farewell." The offerings were rabbits and coloured eggs, bidding an end to winter.

As it happened, the pagan festival of Eostre occurred at the same time of year as the Christian observance of the Resurrection of Christ and it didn't take the Christian missionaries long to convert the Anglo-Saxons when they encountered them in the second century. The offering of rabbits and eggs eventually became the Easter bunny and Easter eggs.

If blood is red, why are veins blue?

Blood is bright red in its oxygenated form and a dark red in deoxygenated form. In simpler terms, it is bright red when it leaves the lungs full of oxygen and dark red when it returns to the lungs for a refill. Veins appear blue because light penetrating the skin is absorbed and reflected in high energy wavelengths back to the eye. Higher energy wavelengths are blue.

Why did Columbus and others try to sail around the world?

You probably know that people native to the Americas are called "Indians" because early explorers like Christopher Columbus thought they had come across the Indian spice islands. Traders were forced to sail westward after the spice route to the East by land was blocked for Europeans by Muslim uprisings.

Why is it called a "loo?"

The British word for toilet, "loo", derives from the French "garde a l'eau!" In medieval Europe people had little conception of hygiene and threw the contents of their chamber pots out the window into the street below. In France the practice was preceded by "garde a l'eau!" ("watch out for the water!"). In England, this phrase was Anglicised, first to "gardy-loo!", then just "loo", and eventually came to mean the toilet/lavatory itself. The American word for toilet, "john", is called after the John Harington who in 1596 invented an indoor water closet for Queen Elizabeth I.

Why is the sky blue?

When sunlight travels through the atmosphere, it collides with gas molecules. These molecules scatter the light. The shorter the wavelength of light, the more it is scattered by the atmosphere. Because it has a shorter wavelength than the other colours, blue light is scattered more, ten times more than red light, for instance. That is why the sky is blue.

Why does the setting sun look reddish orange? When the sun is on the horizon, its light takes a longer path through the atmosphere to reach your eyes than when the sun is directly overhead. By the time the light of the setting sun reaches your eyes, most of the blue light has been scattered out. The light you finally see is reddish orange, the colour of white light minus blue.

Why do onions make you cry?

Onions, like other plants, are made of cells. The cells are divided into two sections separated by a membrane. One side of the membrane contains an enzyme which helps chemical processes occur in your body. The other side of the membrane contains molecules that contain sulfur. When you cut an onion, the contents on each side of the membrane mix and cause a chemical reaction. This reaction produces molecules such as ethylsufine which make your eyes water.

To prevent crying when you cut an onion, cut it under a running tap of cold water. The sulfur compounds dissolve in water and are rinsed down the sink before they reach your eyes. You can also put the onion in the freezer for ten minutes before you cut it. Cold temperatures slow down the reaction between the enzyme and the sulfur compounds so fewer of the burning molecules will reach your eyes.

Why you shouldn't smoke?

If you smoke, you're also inhaling arsenic, benzene, cadmium, hydrogen cyanide, lead, mercury and phonol. In all, 4 000 harmful chemicals, including 44 types of poison, of which 43 are proven cancer-causing substances.

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