Did You Know … Thursday

This week’s 13 is a list of things you just might not know.

1. The word “listen” contains the same letters as the word “silent”.

2. A ‘jiffy’ is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

3. “Almost” is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order. (These are pictures of letters and numbers found on butterfly wings.)

4. A hippopotamus can run faster than a man.

5. A snail can sleep for 3 years.

6. When the doll clothes are hard to put on, sprinkle with corn starch and watch them slide on.

7. A zebra is white with black stripes.

8. The cockroach is the fastest animal on 6 legs covering a meter a second.

9. Hummingbirds are the only animal that can also fly backwards.

10. All the planets in our solar system rotate anticlockwise, except Venus. It is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

11. The whip makes a cracking sound because its tip moves faster than the speed of sound.

12. In 1883 the explosion of the volcano Krakatau put so much dust into the earth’s atmosphere that sunsets appeared green and the moon appeared blue around the world for almost two years.

13. ‘Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia’ is the fear of long words. (Yeah, this picture has nothing to do with that, I just wanted to look at something drool-worthy.)