1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (6 page)

Scotland

has twice as many giant pandas as

Conservative MPs.

Statistically speaking,

the Vatican has two popes

per square kilometre.

Sending a man to the Moon

and finding Osama Bin Laden

cost the US government

about the same amount of time and money:

ten years and $100 billion.

IMAX projectors weigh as much as hippos.

Their bulbs cost $5 million each

and are bright enough to be seen

from the International Space Station.

The International Space Station

has cost more than 30 times

its own weight in gold.

In 2005,

Americans spent 6 billion hours

filling in tax forms,

at an estimated cost of $265 billion.

Between 1948 and 1998,

20,362 Israelis were killed in wars

and 20,852 were killed on the roads.

The American TV sex therapist

Dr Ruth Westheimer

trained as an Israeli sniper.

Snipur

is Icelandic for ‘clitoris’.

Taking cocaine

increases the chance

of having a heart attack

within the hour

by 2,400%.

Oystercatchers

don’t catch oysters.

Cows carry cowpox

but chickens

don’t carry chickenpox.

Cocks don’t have cocks.

In 97% of bird species,

the males don’t have penises.

The rooster on the Corn Flakes box

is called Cornelius.

They chose a rooster

because the word
ceiliog
,

Welsh for cockerel,

sounds a bit like Kellogg.

Welsh

has no single words for

‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Russian

has no word for

‘bigot’.

French

has no word for

‘awkward’.

Latin

has no word for

‘interesting’.

Uranium

is 40 times more common

than silver

and 500 times more common

than gold.

In Spanish,

the word
esposas

means both

‘wives’ and ‘handcuffs’.

Boghandler

is Danish for

‘bookseller’.

Serbia

is the world’s leading exporter

of raspberries.

In 1956,

there were only 12 cars

on Ibiza.

About half a million mice

live in the London Underground.

The Companies Act (2006)

is the longest act in history;

it is so complex that

most British companies

unwittingly break the law

six times a day.

Per head of population,

Britain has 13 times

as many accountants

as Germany.

The average pencil can write

45,000 words,

or a single line 35 miles long.

Venus rotates so slowly on its axis

that its day is longer than its year.

Until the 1960s,

the only reliable pregnancy test

was to inject a woman’s urine

into a female African clawed frog.

If the woman was pregnant,

the frog would ovulate within 12 hours.

Chemotherapy

is a by-product of the mustard gas

used in the First World War.

The year after

the American Civil War ended,

a fifth of Mississippi’s state budget

was spent on artificial limbs

for wounded soldiers.

More than 90%

of all the blackcurrants

grown in Britain

go into Ribena.

Nutmeg is illegal in Saudi Arabia

because it is hallucinogenic

if consumed in large quantities.

Mushrooms

are more closely related to humans

than to plants.

The first holiday

organised by Thomas Cook

was a temperance outing

in the East Midlands.

Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo

all mean ‘capital’

in their respective languages.

Athens is the only capital city in Europe

where the air is more polluted

outside than inside.

Skoda

is Czech for

‘shame’, ‘damage’ or ‘pity’.

At least 109 journeys

between adjacent London Tube stations

are quicker to walk.

QI is the most commonly played word

in Tournament Scrabble.

It’s pronounced ‘chee’ and means

‘life force’ or ‘energy’ in Mandarin.

There are at least 27 million slaves

in the world today,

more than were ever seized from Africa

in the 400 years of the slave trade.

Slaves in America in 1850

cost the equivalent of $40,000.

The going rate today is $90.

More than 80% of the world’s population

takes caffeine,

in tea, coffee or cola,

every day.

There is one and a half times

more caffeine in milk chocolate

than in Coca-Cola.

A lethal dose of chocolate

for a human being is about 22 lb

or 40 bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

A single M&M is enough

to kill a small songbird.

Oliver Cromwell

died of malaria.

To keep someone to prison in the UK

costs
£
45,000 a year:

one and a half times as much

as it would take to send them to Eton.

Fictional Old Etonians include

James Bond, Captain Hook, Bertie Wooster,

Tarzan, John Steed from
The Avengers

and Mr Darcy from
Bridget Jones’s Diary
.

St Brigid of Ireland,

the 6th-century abbess of Kildare,

was noted for the miracle of

transforming her used bathwater

into beer for visiting clerics.

It costs more to make the cardboard box

that Shredded Wheat comes in

than it does to make

the Shredded Wheat itself.

The word botulism

comes from the Latin
botulus
,

meaning ‘a stomach full of delicacies’.

Half a pound of botulinum toxin is

enough to kill

the entire human population of the world.

Botox is made from botulinum toxin.

Almost all the botox in the world

is made in a single factory

in Ireland.

The average British woman

spends
£
100,000 on make-up

in a lifetime.

All blue-eyed people are mutants.

The first ones appeared

as recently as 5,000 years ago.

The scaly anteater, the banded anteater

and the spiny anteater are not anteaters

even though they all eat ants

and are called anteaters.

In the 1950s, to allow babies of students

at Trinity Hall, Cambridge,

to enter the premises,

they were re-defined as cats.

William E. Boeing, founder of

United Airlines,

had a pet Pekingese called

General Motors.

General Electric is the only company

remaining from the original Dow Jones

index of 1896. Since then it has had

fewer than half as many CEOs (4)

as the Vatican has had popes (10).

A
basterly gullion

is ‘a bastard’s bastard’.

Batology

is the study of blackberries.

Botony

means

‘having three knobs’.

Swindon

has the lowest demand for Viagra

of any town in the UK.

The mute swan

is not mute.

Engastration

is the stuffing of one bird

with another.

Cows eat only grass

but have 25,000 taste buds:

two and a half times as many

as humans.

In American Samoa,

it is illegal to beg

with the aid of

a public address system.

A new owl species

is discovered approximately

every ten years.

An adult produces enough hydrogen

in their urine each year

to drive a car

2,700 kilometres.

In 2012, the population of Facebook

passed 1 billion.

If it were a country,

it would be the 3rd-largest

in the world.

Before the Renaissance,

three-quarters of all the books

in the world were in

Chinese.

About 200,000 academic journals

are published in English each year.

The average number

of readers per article

is five.

The average numbers of readers

of any given published scientific paper

is said to be 0.6.

There are two cs

in the word Icelandic,

but there is no letter c

in the Icelandic language.

Katujjiqatigiittiarnirlu

is Inuktitut for

‘simplicity’.

A barnacle’s penis

can be up to 20 times

the length of its body.

27,000 trees

are felled each day

for toilet paper.

The average lavatory seat

is much cleaner

than the average toothbrush.

Your teeth are home to 10,000 million

bacteria per square centimetre.

The pleasant smell of earth after rain

is caused by bacteria in the soil

and is called
petrichor
–

from Greek
petros
, ‘stone’ and
ichor
,

‘the fluid that flows

through the veins of the gods’.

The muscles that close a crocodile’s jaws

exert a force equivalent to

a truck falling off a cliff,

but the muscles that open them

are so weak that

they can be kept shut by a rubber band.

The Royal Mail spends £1 million a year

on a billion red rubber bands.

British postmen use

2 million of them every day.

A hammerhead shark

can be rendered completely immobile

for 15 minutes by turning it over

and tickling its tummy.

Tümmler

is German for

a bottle-nosed dolphin.

99% of Austrians are German,

though most Austrians

insist that they aren’t.

It is commonplace for Austrians

to claim that Hitler

was in fact a German,

whereas Beethoven

was really an Austrian.

Beethoven

was of Belgian extraction.

There are no moles

in Ireland.

If all the asteroids

in the Solar System

were lumped together,

they’d be smaller than the Moon.

There are six vehicles

and 50 tonnes of litter

on the Moon

left behind by the Apollo missions.

Because there is no weather

on the Moon,

the footprints of the 12 men

who walked on it

are still there.

Most astronauts

become two inches taller

in space.

Google earns

$20 billion a year from advertising,

more than the primetime revenues of

CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX combined.

69% of people

in the rear of an aeroplane

survive crashes,

compared to 49%

at the front.

20% of people in the UK

believe they have a food allergy,

but only 2% actually do.

The American secret service

tried to spike Hitler’s carrots

with female hormones

to change him into a woman.