Did You Know? Fun Facts for Students

Water boils at 100 °C at sea level and freezes at 0 °C.

Plants make their own food from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, in a process called photosynthesis.

Honeybees perform a special dance to tell the rest of the hive where flowers are and how far away.

White light is a mix of many colours, and a glass prism can split it into the colours of the rainbow.

Sound cannot travel through a vacuum, so space is completely silent.

We see lightning before we hear thunder because light travels about 900,000 times faster than sound.

Diamond and the graphite in pencils are made of the same element: carbon.

Gold does not rust, because it hardly reacts with oxygen or water.

Water is one of the few substances found naturally on Earth as a solid, a liquid and a gas.

A magnet has a north and a south pole. Like poles repel each other, and opposite poles attract.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.

If you stretched out the DNA in a single human cell, it would be about two metres long.

Any number multiplied by zero equals zero.

The angles of any triangle add up to 180 degrees.

The number 1 is neither a prime number nor a composite number.

You cannot divide by zero; the result is undefined in mathematics.

2 is the only even prime number.

Pi (π) is about 3.14159, and its digits after the decimal point never end and never repeat.

The word "algebra" comes from Arabic, from al-Khwarizmi's book on "al-jabr wa'l-muqabala".

The numbers from 1 to 100 add up to 5,050; a famous story says the mathematician Gauss worked it out cleverly as a child.

The digits 1, 2, 3 used worldwide today developed from the "ghubar" numerals used by Arabs in North Africa and al-Andalus.

Maths lovers celebrate Pi Day on 14 March, because the date is written 3/14.

Hexagons fill a surface with no gaps using the least perimeter, which is why bees build hexagonal cells.

The number 0.999... (nines repeating forever) is exactly equal to 1.

The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters.

World Arabic Language Day is celebrated every year on 18 December.

Arabic has many names for the lion, including layth, dirgham, ghadanfar and hizabr.

Six Arabic letters never join to the letter after them: ا، د، ذ، ر، ز، و.

Around 400 million people speak Arabic, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

Arabic is called "the language of the ḍād" because the letter ض is one of its most distinctive sounds.

Arabic is written from right to left, but numbers are written with the largest place value on the left.

Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali is credited with the first marks for word endings; al-Khalil ibn Ahmad later developed them into today's vowel marks.

Many English words came from Arabic, such as sugar (sukkar), coffee (qahwa) and cotton (qutn).

The oldest known Arabic dictionary is "Kitab al-Ayn" by al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi.

Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi founded the science of Arabic prosody, the study of poetic metres.

Arabic became one of the six official languages of the United Nations in 1973.

The most common letter in English is E.

The English alphabet has 26 letters, including 5 vowel letters: A, E, I, O and U.

In English, the word "I" is always written with a capital letter.

Words that read the same backwards and forwards are called palindromes, like "level" and "racecar".

The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the English alphabet.

The word "facetious" contains all five vowels in alphabetical order.

The word "bookkeeper" has three double letters in a row: oo, kk and ee.

The dot above the letters i and j is called a "tittle".

Words like "set" and "run" have hundreds of different meanings in English dictionaries.

Many English words have Arabic roots, such as "algebra", "algorithm" and "coffee".

English is an official language in more than 50 countries around the world.

Shakespeare is credited with the first recorded use of many words, such as "lonely" and "bedroom".

The Nabataeans carved the city of Petra in Jordan out of rose-coloured rock more than 2,000 years ago.

The first person to walk on the Moon was Neil Armstrong, in 1969.

Cuneiform writing from Mesopotamia is one of the oldest writing systems in the world, more than 5,000 years old.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built about 4,500 years ago and is the only surviving wonder of the ancient world.

The Great Wall of China was built in stages over more than 2,000 years.

Fatima al-Fihri founded al-Qarawiyyin in Fez in 859 CE; it is considered the oldest educational institution still operating.

The House of Wisdom in Baghdad was a world centre of translation and science in the Abbasid era.

Jordan gained its independence on 25 May 1946.

The Phoenician alphabet is one of the oldest, and many alphabets, including Greek and Latin, are believed to descend from it.

Johannes Gutenberg developed the movable-type printing press in Europe around 1440.

The Suez Canal opened in 1869, linking the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea.

Contrary to popular belief, the Great Wall of China cannot be seen with the naked eye from the Moon.

Asia is the largest continent by both area and population.

The Pacific is the largest and deepest ocean in the world.

The highest mountain above sea level is Mount Everest, at about 8,849 metres.

The equator divides the Earth into a northern and a southern hemisphere.

The Nile is one of the longest rivers in the world, at about 6,650 kilometres.

The Dead Sea is the lowest point on land, more than 430 metres below sea level.

Russia is the largest country in the world by area.

Vatican City is the smallest country in the world by area.

In the most common model, there are seven continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia.

The Sahara is the largest hot desert, but the largest desert of all is Antarctica, because it is so dry.

The Gulf of Aqaba is Jordan's only access to the sea.

Wadi Rum Protected Area in Jordan was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2011.

The Sun is a star, and it is the closest star to Earth.

There are eight planets in the solar system orbiting the Sun.

The Moon does not make its own light; it reflects sunlight.

Mars is called the "Red Planet" because of the iron oxide (rust) in its soil.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system; more than 1,300 Earths could fit inside it.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun.

Sunlight takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth.

A day on Venus is longer than its year.

Saturn is less dense than water, so in theory it would float in a big enough bathtub.

The International Space Station orbits the Earth about once every 90 minutes.

The Sun makes up about 99.8% of the mass of the entire solar system.

Astronauts' footprints on the Moon could last for millions of years, because there is no wind or rain there.

The skin is the largest organ of the human body.

The thigh bone (femur) is the longest bone in the human body.

No two people have the same fingerprints, not even identical twins.

People blink about 15 to 20 times a minute.

The liver is the largest internal organ in the human body.

The smallest bone in the human body is the stirrup (stapes) in the middle ear.

Babies are born with about 300 bones; some fuse as they grow, leaving adults with 206.

The human heart beats about 100,000 times a day.

The cells lining the stomach are renewed every few days to protect it from strong stomach acid.

The human brain contains about 86 billion nerve cells (neurons).

The gluteus maximus in the hip is the largest muscle in the human body.

Scientists estimate the human eye can tell apart around a million colours or more.