50 General Knowledge Facts That Will Surprise You

Great quiz players are made, not born. The fastest way to improve is to feed your brain a steady stream of interesting facts — and to remember the one-line reason behind each one, because a fact with a reason attached is far harder to forget. Here are fifty, grouped by topic, each with the "why" that makes it stick.

Science and Space

1. A day on Venus is longer than its year. Venus takes about 243 Earth days to spin once, but only about 225 days to orbit the Sun.
2. Honey never really spoils. It is low in water and naturally acidic, so bacteria cannot grow in it. Archaeologists have found edible honey in ancient Egyptian tombs.
3. Bananas are berries; strawberries are not. Botanically, a berry develops from a single flower with one ovary and keeps its seeds inside. Strawberries wear theirs on the outside.
4. Sunlight is about eight minutes old. Light covers the roughly 150 million kilometres from the Sun in a little over eight minutes.
5. Water grows when it freezes. It expands by about 9%, which is why ice floats and why frozen pipes burst.
6. Diamond and pencil "lead" are the same element. Both are pure carbon; only the arrangement of the atoms differs.
7. Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood. Their blood carries oxygen with a copper-based molecule, which turns it blue.
8. Adults have 206 bones. Babies start with around 300, and many fuse together as they grow.
9. Sound moves about four times faster in water than in air. Roughly 1,480 metres per second, compared with about 343 in air.
10. Venus, not Mercury, is the hottest planet. Mercury is closer to the Sun, but Venus's thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps heat like a greenhouse.

History

11. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire. Teaching at Oxford existed by 1096; the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325.
12. Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. The pyramid dates to around 2560 BC; Cleopatra died in 30 BC.
13. The Great Fire of London (1666) had very few recorded deaths. It destroyed most of the medieval city, but only a handful of deaths were officially recorded.
14. Napoleon was not especially short. At around 1.69 m he was about average for his time. Confusion between French and English inches helped the myth along.
15. The Hundred Years' War lasted 116 years. It ran, on and off, from 1337 to 1453.
16. Vikings did not wear horned helmets. The image comes largely from 19th-century costume design, especially for Wagner's operas.
17. The shortest war on record lasted under an hour. The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 was over in roughly 40 minutes.
18. World War I ended at 11 o'clock on the 11th day of the 11th month. The armistice took effect on 11 November 1918.
19. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Border crossings opened on 9 November, and Germany reunified the following year.
20. Gutenberg's press changed everything. His movable-type printing press, developed around the 1440s, made books affordable across Europe.

Geography

21. Russia spans 11 time zones. When it is morning in Moscow, it is evening on the Pacific coast.
22. Africa is the only continent in all four hemispheres. Both the Equator and the Prime Meridian cross it.
23. Australia's capital is Canberra. Not Sydney — Canberra was built as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne.
24. Vatican City is the smallest country. It covers less than half a square kilometre.
25. Canada has the world's longest coastline. Thousands of Arctic islands push its total far beyond any other country's.
26. Lake Baikal is the deepest lake. The Siberian lake holds roughly a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh surface water.
27. Everest is the highest mountain, but not the tallest. Measured from base to peak, Mauna Kea in Hawaii is taller — most of it is underwater.
28. The Dead Sea shore is the lowest land on Earth. It sits more than 400 metres below sea level.
29. The largest desert is Antarctica. A desert is defined by low precipitation, not heat. The Sahara is the largest hot desert.
30. Istanbul stands on two continents. The Bosphorus strait divides the city between Europe and Asia.

Nature

31. The blue whale is the largest animal ever known. It outweighs even the biggest dinosaurs.
32. The cheetah is the fastest land animal. It can sprint at around 100 km/h, but only for short bursts.
33. The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal of all. In a hunting dive it can exceed 300 km/h.
34. A group of crows is called a murder. Many of these collective nouns date back to medieval hunting books.
35. Koala fingerprints closely resemble ours. They are so similar that they can be hard to tell apart under a microscope.
36. Sloths move so slowly that algae grows on their fur. The green tint even helps camouflage them in the trees.
37. Sharks are older than trees. Sharks appear in the fossil record more than 400 million years ago; trees came later.
38. One jellyfish can turn back its own life cycle. Turritopsis dohrnii can revert to an earlier stage, earning it the nickname "immortal jellyfish".
39. Some bamboo can grow close to a metre in a day. It is among the fastest-growing plants on Earth.
40. Hummingbirds can fly backwards. They are the only birds that can do it in sustained flight.

Language and Culture

41. Thursday is Thor's day. Several English weekdays are named after Norse gods; Saturday comes from the Roman god Saturn.
42. "Salary" is linked to salt. It comes from the Latin salarium, connected to sal, meaning salt.
43. The Bible is the best-selling and most translated book. It has been translated, in whole or in part, into thousands of languages.
44. Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers. English has the most speakers when second-language learners are counted.
45. Papua New Guinea has more than 800 languages. That is over a tenth of all the languages spoken on Earth.
46. The Olympic rings were designed to be inclusive. Pierre de Coubertin chose five colours plus white so that every nation's flag of the time contained at least one of them.
47. A standard piano has 88 keys. 52 white and 36 black.
48. The Eiffel Tower grows in summer. Heat makes the iron expand, so the tower can be several centimetres taller on a hot day.
49. There are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe. Estimates of possible games run to around 10¹²⁰, against roughly 10⁸⁰ atoms.
50. A "jiffy" is a real unit. In physics it has been used for the time light takes to travel one centimetre — about 33 trillionths of a second.

How to Make These Stick

Do not try to learn all fifty in one sitting. Pick ten, read them once, then close this page and try to recall them the next day. Whatever you missed, look up again. This is called active recall, and it beats re-reading every time.

It also helps to say the reason out loud. "Venus has a long day because it spins so slowly" is much easier to remember than a bare fact. Better still, tell someone else — explaining a fact is one of the best ways to keep it.

Ready to put them to work? Try a free General Knowledge quiz, or take on today's Daily Challenge and see where you rank.