The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham Page A
Authors: Noel Botham
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represent the continents.
Olympic badminton rules say that the birdie has to have exactly fourteen feathers.
The city of Denver was chosen to host and then refused the 1976 Winter Olympics.
FISHING FOR SWIMMERS
A top freestyle swimmer achieves a speed of only four miles per hour. Fish, in contrast, have been clocked at sixty-?eight miles per hour.
Captain Matthew Webb of England was the first to swim the English Channel using the breaststroke.
SURPRISING SPORTS
In the United States, more Frisbee discs are sold each year than baseballs, basketballs, and footballs combined.
Kite-?flying is a professional sport in Thailand.
There are at least two sports in which the team has to move backward to win—tug-?of-?war and rowing.
Badminton used to be called “Poona.”
PIN AND CONQUER
The national sport of Japan is sumo wrestling.
Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, once pinned a sumo wrestler using only a single finger.
Nearly all sumo wrestlers have flat feet and big bottoms.
The 1912 Greco-?Roman wrestling match in Stockholm between Finn Alfred Asikainen and Russian Martin Klein lasted more than eleven hours.
LORDS OF THE ICE
A hockey puck is one inch thick.
Canada imports about 850 Russian-?made hockey sticks on an average day.
Professional hockey players skate at average speeds of twenty to twenty-?five miles per hour.
ON STRIKES
Three consecutive strikes in bowling are called a turkey.
Tokyo has the world’s largest bowling alley.
The bowling ball was invented in 1862.
FIRST CONTACT
The game of squash originated in the United Kingdom.
Australian Rules Football was originally designed to give cricketers something to play during the off-?season.
Karate actually originated in India.
DANGEROUS GAMES
The only bone not broken so far during any ski accident is one located in the inner ear.
AND THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD IS…
Sports Illustrated has the largest sports magazine circulation.
AND MAYBE THIS IS WHY…
Cathy Rigby is the only woman to pose nude for Sports Illustrated.
THROW THE GAME
A forfeited game in baseball is recorded as a 9–0 score. In football, it is recorded as a 1–0 score.
TEAM SPIRIT
In the four professional major North American sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), only eight teams’ nicknames do not end with “s.” These teams are the Miami Heat, the Utah Jazz, the Orlando Magic, the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox, the Colorado Avalanche, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and the Minnesota Wild.
I’M SO HIGH RIGHT NOW…
Pole vault poles used to be stiff. Now they bend, which allows the vaulter to go much higher.
SCIENTIFICALLY SPEAKING
AMAZING DISCOVERIES
A device invented as a primitive steam engine by the Greek engineer Hero, about the time of the birth of Christ, is used today as a rotating lawn sprinkler.
Construction workers’ hard hats were first invented and used in the building of the Hoover Dam in 1933.
Leonardo da Vinci invented the concept of the parachute, but his design was fatally flawed in that it did not allow air to pass through the top of the chute. Therefore, the chute would not fall straight, but would tilt to the side, lose its air, and plummet. He also invented the scissors.
Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, was afraid of the dark.
NOT-?SO-?GREAT MOMENTS
The first atomic bomb exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico.
India tested its first nuclear bomb in 1974.
A WEATHER EYE
A normal raindrop falls at about seven miles per hour.
A downburst is a downward-?blowing wind that sometimes comes blasting out of a thunderstorm. The damage looks like tornado damage, because the wind can be as strong as an F2 tornado, but debris is blown straight away from a point on the ground, not lifted into the air and transported downwind.
A wind with a speed of seventy-?four miles per hour or more is designated a hurricane.
An inch of snow falling evenly on 1 acre of ground is equivalent to about 2,715 gallons of
Olympic badminton rules say that the birdie has to have exactly fourteen feathers.
The city of Denver was chosen to host and then refused the 1976 Winter Olympics.
FISHING FOR SWIMMERS
A top freestyle swimmer achieves a speed of only four miles per hour. Fish, in contrast, have been clocked at sixty-?eight miles per hour.
Captain Matthew Webb of England was the first to swim the English Channel using the breaststroke.
SURPRISING SPORTS
In the United States, more Frisbee discs are sold each year than baseballs, basketballs, and footballs combined.
Kite-?flying is a professional sport in Thailand.
There are at least two sports in which the team has to move backward to win—tug-?of-?war and rowing.
Badminton used to be called “Poona.”
PIN AND CONQUER
The national sport of Japan is sumo wrestling.
Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, once pinned a sumo wrestler using only a single finger.
Nearly all sumo wrestlers have flat feet and big bottoms.
The 1912 Greco-?Roman wrestling match in Stockholm between Finn Alfred Asikainen and Russian Martin Klein lasted more than eleven hours.
LORDS OF THE ICE
A hockey puck is one inch thick.
Canada imports about 850 Russian-?made hockey sticks on an average day.
Professional hockey players skate at average speeds of twenty to twenty-?five miles per hour.
ON STRIKES
Three consecutive strikes in bowling are called a turkey.
Tokyo has the world’s largest bowling alley.
The bowling ball was invented in 1862.
FIRST CONTACT
The game of squash originated in the United Kingdom.
Australian Rules Football was originally designed to give cricketers something to play during the off-?season.
Karate actually originated in India.
DANGEROUS GAMES
The only bone not broken so far during any ski accident is one located in the inner ear.
AND THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD IS…
Sports Illustrated has the largest sports magazine circulation.
AND MAYBE THIS IS WHY…
Cathy Rigby is the only woman to pose nude for Sports Illustrated.
THROW THE GAME
A forfeited game in baseball is recorded as a 9–0 score. In football, it is recorded as a 1–0 score.
TEAM SPIRIT
In the four professional major North American sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), only eight teams’ nicknames do not end with “s.” These teams are the Miami Heat, the Utah Jazz, the Orlando Magic, the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox, the Colorado Avalanche, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and the Minnesota Wild.
I’M SO HIGH RIGHT NOW…
Pole vault poles used to be stiff. Now they bend, which allows the vaulter to go much higher.
SCIENTIFICALLY SPEAKING
AMAZING DISCOVERIES
A device invented as a primitive steam engine by the Greek engineer Hero, about the time of the birth of Christ, is used today as a rotating lawn sprinkler.
Construction workers’ hard hats were first invented and used in the building of the Hoover Dam in 1933.
Leonardo da Vinci invented the concept of the parachute, but his design was fatally flawed in that it did not allow air to pass through the top of the chute. Therefore, the chute would not fall straight, but would tilt to the side, lose its air, and plummet. He also invented the scissors.
Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, was afraid of the dark.
NOT-?SO-?GREAT MOMENTS
The first atomic bomb exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico.
India tested its first nuclear bomb in 1974.
A WEATHER EYE
A normal raindrop falls at about seven miles per hour.
A downburst is a downward-?blowing wind that sometimes comes blasting out of a thunderstorm. The damage looks like tornado damage, because the wind can be as strong as an F2 tornado, but debris is blown straight away from a point on the ground, not lifted into the air and transported downwind.
A wind with a speed of seventy-?four miles per hour or more is designated a hurricane.
An inch of snow falling evenly on 1 acre of ground is equivalent to about 2,715 gallons of
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