Things I Learned While
Reading This Summer (1996)
by Dick Sietz
First published in FACTORIAL, a publication
of the Detroit Area Council of Teachers of
Mathematics, Vol. 28, No. 1.
Reprinted in VIRGINIA MATHEMATICS TEACHER,
Volume 23, No.3, Spring 1997.
-
99% of the universe is Nothing!
-
There are 97 million households in the USA --
55% are couples.
-
The United States has 42,496 ZIP codes.
-
There-are 190 towns or villages called Midway
in the United States.
-
One in every 14 laptop computers sold in the
United States was stolen.
-
One in 22,000 people in the US are amputees.
One in 200 in Cambodia.
-
The archeological date 20,000 B.P. means
20,000 Before Present year.
-
During the two minute silence for the memory
of D-Day, the NYSE would normally sell
$28,000,000 in stock.
-
The Old Man And The Sea is six words of length
three.
-
It takes 90 minutes to hard boil an ostrich egg.
-
Big Bird has 4000 feathers.
-
Fifteen million BIC pens are made each day.
-
Leon's 84th anniversary sale ad- No
payments for 8.4 months!
-
Wyandotte Art Fair: "The artist has been coming
to the annual street fair for the last 7 1/2
years."
-
People are using 79 cent windshield cleaner
in place of $1.49 Windex- nice idea, but its
a poison!
-
A restaurant in Las Vegas charges $45.00 for an
a la carte steak -- only 41 seats in the
restaurant.
-
With most duos in a restaurant, one person
usually does 80% of the talking.
-
A woman says about 7000 words each day -- a man
says 2000.
-
Seventy percent of the new condominiums in
Royal Oak were purchased by single women.
-
Rush Limbaugh has gained ten pounds since his
show lost nine markets.
-
A box of ten Jos Libertadores cigars costs
$58.30.
-
Miller Brewing Company spends $300,000 each
year to promote a scholarship fund, which
endows $150,000 in scholarships.
-
Only 370,000 hectoliters of lambric (carefully
prepared) beer is brewed in all of Europe.
-
Fifteen liters of gas in Japan will cost a
traveler $18.53 -- almost $5.00 a gallon.
-
Mercedes-Benz offers a paint job that changes
colors depending on one's point of view -- $6600.
-
Comment by a shopper, "They're only open
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
They're closed Saturday and Sunday."
-
If 2% or 3% of a junk mailing gets a response it
is considered successful.
-
An ad for the Saab 900 claims it has 49 cubic
feet of trunk space available to haul away
junk mail.
-
You lose one-sixteenth of an inch in height
per year after age 30.
-
An 18 ounce box of Wheaties will contain
approximately 3450 flakes.
-
You would need 396 million gallons of milk to
fill the Skydome in Toronto.
-
The United States Congress suggested that a
human life has a minimum value of $7.5 million.
-
There has been one mosh-pit death at a concert
in the United States.
-
400,000 peaches will be distributed to the
athletes during the Olympics in Atlanta.
-
America produces 1.43 billion gallons of ice
per year -- averaging 46.3 pints per person.
-
Dragonflies are among the fastest insects on
wings. They can fly 35 miles per hour.
-
There are ten thousand trillion ants in the
world -- they average one to five milligrams
-- the total weight of all the ants in the
world equals the weight of all the humans on
earth.