Did you know? 25 amazing facts that will surprise you

"Did you know…?" — whatever comes after these three words often surprises us. But many of the "facts" going round the internet are half-true or wrong. Here are 25 facts that are both surprising and checked. They are divided into five groups to make them easy to read and remember. (In Hindi, "did you know" is "क्या आप जानते हैं".)

Food and drink

1. Did you know that, botanically, a banana is a berry but a strawberry is not?
2. The peanut is not really a nut but a member of the legume (pulse) family.
3. Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world — lakhs of flower threads are picked by hand for one kilo. Kashmiri saffron has a Geographical Indication (GI) tag.
4. Honey can last thousands of years without spoiling; edible honey has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs.
5. Mumbai's dabbawalas deliver about two lakh (200,000) tiffins every day with very few mistakes — management schools around the world have studied them.

Wonders of history

1. The shortest war in history was fought between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896 and was over in about 38 to 45 minutes.
2. Cleopatra of Egypt lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
3. Teaching had begun at Oxford University by about 1096 — before Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire in Mexico, was founded (1325).
4. France gave the Statue of Liberty to the United States in 1886. The copper statue was once a coppery brown; air and moisture gave it its green coat.
5. The Great Wall of China cannot be seen from the Moon with the naked eye — that is a famous myth.

Did you know? The English word "shampoo" comes from the Hindi "champo" (to massage the head). "Jungle", "bungalow", "pyjama" and "thug" are also words that went into English from Indian languages.

Earth and sky

1. The Pacific Ocean is so big that all the land on Earth put together is smaller than it.
2. Russia is so wide that it has 11 time zones.
3. Indian Standard Time (IST) is set by the 82.5° east line of longitude, which passes near Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, and is 5 hours 30 minutes ahead of world time (UTC).
4. Thousands of years ago the Sahara desert was green, with lakes and grasslands.
5. According to NASA, lightning strikes the Earth about 44 times every second.
6. Jupiter's "Great Red Spot" is a giant storm, bigger than the Earth, that has been raging for centuries.

The animal world

1. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
2. Sea otters hold hands while sleeping so that they do not drift apart in the water.
3. A polar bear's skin is black and its hairs are actually transparent — they look white because of the light.
4. A blue whale's tongue can weigh about as much as an elephant.
5. The snow leopard cannot roar; it growls and hisses instead.
6. The droppings of Australia's wombat are shaped like cubes.

Unusual India

1. Cochin Airport in Kerala became the world's first fully solar-powered airport in 2015.
2. India has more than one and a half lakh (150,000) post offices — the largest postal network in the world.
3. In Meghalaya, "living root bridges", made by bending and joining the roots of trees, last for hundreds of years.

More surprising facts: 15 amazing science facts · 20 facts about the human body · The world's smallest country.

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