GregR
Footballguy
A collection of mostly useless but sometimes interesting things I've come across.
Links to previous Useless Trivia:
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1) What medical-related term's origins come from the Italian word for "forty"?
2) Which continent has the most countries?
3) The oldest surviving recipe for this is 3900 years old, though Chinese pottery has older evidence it was being made as much as 4900 to 5400 years ago.
4) What land mammal has the largest eye?
5) What animal of any type has the largest eye?
6) Ian Fleming's choice of the name James Bond for his iconic spy character was inspired by a real life James Bond of another occupation. What occupation was he?
7) This substance's name originally came from a 1500s French ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nicot de Villemain.
8) Tim Berners-Lee is credited with creating something that today is part of most people's daily lives. What is it?
9) About how many eggs does an average hen lay in a year under natural conditions?
a) 85
b) 135
c) 265
d) 345
e) 415
10) How many states contain land obtained during the Louisiana Purchase?
a) 15
b) 17
c) 20
d) 22
Links to previous Useless Trivia:
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#2
#3
#4
#5
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#8
#9
#10
#11
#12
#13
#14
#15
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1) What medical-related term's origins come from the Italian word for "forty"?
Quarantine. From seventeenth-century Venetian 'quaranta giorni', meaning forty days, was the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.
2) Which continent has the most countries?
While several sites I looked at had slightly different numbers, they all had Africa with the most with about 54.
3) The oldest surviving recipe for this is 3900 years old, though Chinese pottery has older evidence it was being made as much as 4900 to 5400 years ago.
Beer. A 3900-year-old Sumerian poem honoring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread.
4) What land mammal has the largest eye?
The horse. It's eye is on average about 35mm in size, while an elephant's is 34mm.
5) What animal of any type has the largest eye?
The collosal squid has a 280mm eye, roughly the size of a soccer ball, and just short of being twice the size of that of a blue whale. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/be/11/db/be11dbc78860d8a2d3a1af8beba98ab4.jpg
6) Ian Fleming's choice of the name James Bond for his iconic spy character was inspired by a real life James Bond of another occupation. What occupation was he?
James Bond was an ornithologist and author of the field guide Birds of the West Indies. Fleming was an avid bird watcher and owned a copy of the book and thought the author's name was a perfect name for his spy.
7) This substance's name originally came from a 1500s French ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nicot de Villemain.
Nicotine. Nicotine is named after the tobacco plant Nicotiana tabacum, which in turn is named after Jean Nicto de Villemain, who sent tobacco and seeds to the French king in Paris in 1560, and promoted their medical use against the plague.
8) Tim Berners-Lee is credited with creating something that today is part of most people's daily lives. What is it?
The World Wide Web. Berners-Lee was a software engineer at CERN. He created HTML, URI, and HTTP, as well as the first browser: WorldWideWeb.app.
9) About how many eggs does an average hen lay in a year under natural conditions?
a) 85
b) 135
c) 265
d) 345
e) 415
c) Somewhere in the 240-265 range seems a commonly given number. A new egg begins forming as soon as the previous one was laid, and takes about 26 hours to form fully. However, the formation is light sensitive, and eventually a hen will lay too late in a day for its body to begin forming a new egg. The hen will then skip a day or more before laying again. With UV lamps a hen can be tricked into laying as many as 300 eggs a year.
10) How many states contain land obtained during the Louisiana Purchase?
a) 15
b) 17
c) 20
d) 22
a) 15. Today all or parts of the following 15 states were formed from the Louisiana territories: Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana.
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