A friend of mine emailed me a list of
really fun facts... I read them all and thought, "Wow,
that's cool. I didn't know that!" Then, it
occurred to me that these things might not be true at all.
Just because someone says it in an email or on a website
doesn't mean that something is true!
This isn't quite math... It's
called "critical thinking." One part of critical
thinking is when you look at something and say, "Hmm...
I wonder if that's really true. I'm going to do some
investigating and see for myself." Another kind of
critical thinking is when you have to figure out a hard math
problem or puzzle. So, really, you do LOTS of critical
thinking in math and on Coolmath!
OK, here's the list of things my
friend sent... Are they really true? I think you
should do some investigating and decide for yourself!
How are you going to do it? Some things you can look
up... and some you can do your own experiments on!
Maybe your teacher will let you work on them as a class
project! (There may be
some words that you're going to have to look up in the
dictionary!)
"Stewardesses" is the
longest word typed with only
the left hand.
And "lollipop" is the
longest word typed with your
right hand.
No
word in the English language
rhymes with month, orange,
silver, or purple.
"Dreamt" is the only English
word that ends in the
letters "mt".
Our eyes are
always the same size from birth, but
our nose and ears never stop
growing.
The sentence:
"The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog" uses every letter of the
alphabet.
The words "racecar," "kayak" and
"level" are the same whether they
are read left to right or right to
left. These are called
palindromes. How many more can
you think of?
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There are only four words in the English
language which end in "dous":
tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and
hazardous.
There are two
words in the English language that have
all five vowels in order: "abstemious"
and "facetious."
TYPEWRITER is the
longest word that can be made using the
letters only on one row of the keyboard.
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A cat has 32 muscles
in each ear. (My cat, Tigger, sure does move his ears
around a lot!)
A goldfish has a memory span of three
seconds. (How would a goldfish do on a math test?)
A shark is the only fish that can blink with
both eyes.
A snail can sleep for three years.
Almonds are a member of the peach family.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't
appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
February 1865 is the only month in
recorded history not to have a full moon.
In the last 4,000 years, no new animals
have been domesticated.
There are more chickens than people in the
world.
Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
Peanuts are one of the
ingredients of dynamite!
Rubber bands last longer when
refrigerated.
The average person's left hand does 56% of the
typing.
The cruise liner, QE 2, moves only six inches
for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
The microwave was invented after a researcher
walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara
Falls froze completely solid.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
(Maybe it's just because their make-up makes their
eyes dry?)
Winston Churchill was born
in a ladies' room during a dance.
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