Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery (33 page)

• In some American states you can get a learner's driving licence at
fourteen
(
eighteen
in New York City). In New Zealand the age limit is
fifteen
, in the UK,
seventeen
.

• The Great Wall of China is believed to have been funded by one of the world's earliest lotteries.

• The age of consent for sex varies around the world:
fourteen
in Hungary,
twenty
in Tunisia,
sixteen
in the US and the UK. In Columbia and Peru the age of consent is
fourteen
for boys,
twelve
for girls.

• England's first recorded lottery was in 1566 – the draw took place three years later by Queen Elizabeth I. Every ticket won a prize.

• Dr Chris Boyce, Economic Psychologist at Warwick University, compared the happiness levels of lottery winners with those of people who had psychological therapy to improve their mental health. He found that a course of therapy costing
eight hundred
pounds provides the same amount of happiness as a
twenty-five thousand
pound windfall, and concluded that therapy was therefore
thirty-one
times more cost-effective in making people happier than a lottery win.

•
Ninety-eight
percent of UK lottery winners say they are as happy or happier since their win.
Ninety-seven
percent give money to family and
sixty-nine
percent give presents to friends.

• Tabloids called Michael Carroll,
nineteen
, the ‘Lotto Lout' after he won
£9.7 million
in 2002. The former binman collected his cheque wearing a prison monitoring tag, and has many convictions. He immediately bought
four
homes, a holiday villa in Spain,
two
convertible BMWs,
two
Mercedes Benz cars and several quad bikes. He was declared bankrupt in 2010, and said he had reapplied for his old job as a binman.

• In most countries, including the UK, the legal age for drinking is
eighteen
, but in most American states it is
twenty-one
. In many Muslim countries the consumption of alcohol is illegal at any age.

• The UK lottery has raised more than
twenty-five billion
pounds for good causes.

•
Thirty-seven billion
pounds has been paid out by the UK lottery in prizes, creating more than
two thousand, four hundred
millionaires or multi-millionaires.

• Tracey Makin from Belfast was just
sixteen
when she won just over
one million
pounds in 1998. Tracey invested her money and stayed in her office job.

• The minimum wage in the UK in 2011 is
£5.93
an hour. A specialist nurse gets
£10.22.
Wayne Rooney's contract with Manchester United is estimated to pay him
£936
an hour.

• Roughly
one
in
eight
of the world's population do not have access to safe water.
2.6 billion
people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, this is almost
two fifths
of the world's population.
1.4 million
children die every year from diarrhoea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation. It costs just
one hundred
pounds to build a well in Nigeria (source wateraid.org).

• In most countries, including the UK, the legal voting age is
eighteen
. However some countries give you the vote at
sixteen
– including Austria, Brazil, Jersey and Guernsey – or at
seventeen
, for example, East Timor and the Seychelles. In Uzbekistan the minimum age for voting is
twenty-five.

• Breast enlargement prices at one of Britain's leading cosmetic surgery groups start from
£3,695.
This includes a
ten
year breast implant warranty.

• In 2008,
eighteen
-year-old student Ianthe Fullagar from Cumbria won
seven million
pounds with her second ever lottery ticket. She said she would still go to university to study law, and would invest most of the money for her future. She said: “I have worked very hard to get where I am and I still plan to go to university. I just plan to live like a normal student and not like a millionaire.”