1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off Read Online Free PDF

delightful but
    meaningless
    way’.
     
    Hungarian has no words
    for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’,
    but nine specific words
    for different kinds of brother or sister.
     
    In North Welsh,
    the word for ‘now’ is
rwan
,
    in South Welsh it is
nawr
,
    the same word spelt backwards.
     
     

 
    Gold has its own E number.
    E175
    is officially suitable for consumption
    by vegetarians, vegans and members
    of all religious groups.
     
    The Victorians
    made tiepins
    out of badgers’ penis bones.
     
    Some parts of Tasmania
    are so fertile that
    the topsoil is 70 feet deep.
     
    Trinity College, Cambridge,
    has won more Nobel Prizes
    than the whole of Italy.
     

    The human body has 100 trillion cells,
    each one a 10,000th the size of a pinhead
    but containing enough DNA instructions
    to fill 1,000 600-page books.
     
    Every three seconds,
    the Sun emits more neutrinos
    than the number of atoms
    in all the humans who have ever lived.
     
    Neutrinos are 100,000 times
    smaller than electrons,
    but there are so many of them
    that they may outweigh
    all the visible matter in the universe.
     
    If an atom were the size
    of the Solar System,
    a neutrino would be the size
    of a golf ball.
     

    The man who sees to the needs of VIPs
    in the official presidential guest house
    in Washington DC
    is called Randy Bumgardner.
     
    The founder of Pan American Airlines
    was called
    Juan Trippe.
     
    The Archbishop of Manila
    from 1974–2003
    was called Cardinal Sin.
     
    Robert Burns was never called
    Rabbie or Robbie – though he did
    occasionally call himself Spunkie.
     

    The film
Jaws
was based on a novel
    by Peter Benchley.
    When he couldn’t think of a title,
    his father, Nathaniel, suggested
    What’s That Noshin’ On Ma Leg.
     
    As soon as tiger shark embryos
    develop teeth
    they attack and eat each other
    in the womb.
     
    If the three quarks in a hydrogen atom
    were scaled up to the size of garden peas,
    the hydrogen atom
    would be 1,000 miles across.
     
    If all the land in Finland
    were distributed equally,
    each Finn would have 14% more space
    than Heathrow Airport’s shopping area.
     

    Human saliva
    contains a painkiller called
opiorphin
    that is six times more powerful
    than morphine.
     
    The average American produces
    10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime:
    about the same amount of water as leaks
    from the average American home
    in a year.
     
    The platypus and the echidna
    are the only mammals
    that could make their own custard:
    they both lay eggs
    and produce milk.
     
    The Chupa Chups logo
    was designed by
    Salvador Dalí.
     

    4,000 McDonald’s hamburgers
    (as many as you could get from one cow)
    are eaten every minute.
     
    Every year,
    4 million cats
    are eaten in Asia.
     
    In 2011, Chinese billionaire Long Liyuan
    was murdered at a business lunch
    by means of poison in his
    slow-boiled
    cat-meat
    casserole.
     
    When eating jelly babies,
    nearly eight out of ten people
    bite off the heads first.
     

    More gold is recoverable
    from a tonne of personal computers
    than from 17 tonnes
    of gold ore.
     
    The gold dissolved in the world’s oceans
    is estimated to be worth $475 trillion:
    about 30 times
    the US public debt.
     
    In 1917, John D. Rockefeller
    could have paid off
    the whole US public debt on his own.
    Today, Bill Gates’s entire fortune
    would barely cover two months’ interest.
     
    Tyrannosaurus rex
(65 million years ago)
    is closer in time to us than to
    Diplodocus
(150 million years ago).
     

    There are about 6,900 languages
    in existence but more than
    half the world’s population
    uses only 20 of them.
     
    In English, the name of every number
    shares a letter with each neighbour.
    One shares an O with two, which shares a
    T with three, which shares an R with four,
    which shares an F with five, which shares
    an I with six – and so on indefinitely.
     
    Archimedes’ number
myriakis-myriostas
    periodu myriakis-myriston
    arithmon myriai myriades
    is one followed by 80 quadrillion