It's An Amazing World

Start again to enlarge our knowledge, Fellas !!!

Deserts

Nearly one eighth of the world's land surface is desert. Each day, the world's desert is increase by 160 square kilometers.

Caves

In Mammoth Caves National Park, in the United States, there is a cave system with nearly 300 kilometers of passages already explored.

         In the Carlsbard Caverns, New Mexico, there is a cave 77 meters high and 550 meters across.

Ice and Water

About 10% of the earth's land surface is covered with ice.

          There is a place on the Antarctic continent where the land (under the  ice cap) is 2,468 meters below sea level.

          Greenland, the world's largest island (not counting Australia) is covered by a thick ice cap; there may in fact be a group of several islands underneath.

          The coldest place in the world is Vostok, in Antarctica. Temperatures of -88 Celcius Degree have been recorded. (The world's hottest recorded temperature was 58 Celcius Degree at Al 'Aziziyah', in Libya.

          The largest iceberg ever seen was 335 kilometers and 97 kilometers wide-larger than Belgium.

          More than 70% of the earth's surface is covered by water.

Mountains

The world's tallest mountain from base to summit is not Everest. it is Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, whose total height is 10.203 meters (including 5,998 meters below surface of the sea).

          The highest mountain which is completely below the surface of the sea is between Samoa and New Zealand - it is 8,690 meters high.

Rivers, Lakes and Waterfalls

The world's longest rivers, the Amazon and the Nile, are both about 6,400 kilometers long from source to mouth.

             The biggest lake in the world is the Caspian Sea.

             The biggest lake in a lake is Manitou lake (with an area of more than 100 square kilometers), on Manitou island in Lake Huron, North America.

             The world's highest waterfall is Angel Falls in Venezuela: the total drop is 979 meters.

A Year in the Life of an ESL Student

A Year in the Life of an ESL Student

From The Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov: The Technological World

More Light, Less Sleep
Thanks to the electrical light, Americans today, on the average, sleep 1,2 hours less Americans of six decades ago. A University of Florida report noted that most adults sleep 7,5 hours a day and that about 15% sleep less than 6,5 hours.

Mighty Micro-chip
A chip of silllicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1946 ENIAC computer, which occupied a whole room.

World's Smallest Motor
The world's smallest electric motor weighs one half-millionth of a pound ans is smaller than the head of pin. Built by a Californian, William McLellan, the motor measures a sixty-fourth of an inch on all sides. It has thirteen parts and generates one-millionth of a horsepower. It can be seen in an operation
only through a microscope. McLellan built a motor using a toothpick, a microscope, and a watchmaker's lather.

The First Traffic Lights

In 1930, a Detroit policeman named William L.Potts worked out an electric light system that allowed him to control three street intersections from one tower. he picked the colors red, yellow and green because railroads used them. These were the first street traffic lights.

Forces of Attraction
An electron and a positron attract each other in two ways: the electromagnetic attraction of their opposite electric charges, and the gravitational attraction ot their two masses. The electromagnetic attraction is 4,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as strong as the gravitational. (Of the four known forces-gravitation, weak interaction, electromagnetic interaction, strong interaction- the gravitational force by far the weakest).

The Largest Light Bulb
The largest light bulb was a foot-long 75,000-watt bulb handblown at the Corning Works to celebrate seventy-fifth anniversary of Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp.

Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody

 (from The Greening of America by Charles R)

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody;s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

Honesty in Business

'My boy,' said a businessman to his son, 'there are two things that are vitally necessary if you are to succeed in business.'

'What are they, dad?'

'Honesty and wisdom.'

'What is honesty?'

'Always-it doesn't matter what happens, or however badly it may affect you - always keep your word once you have given it.'

'And wisdom?'




'Never give your word.'

Fairy Tale

He built himself a house,

                   his foundations,

                   his stones,

                   his walls,

                   his roof overhead,

                   his chimney and smoke,

                   his view from the window.

He made himself a garden,

                   his fence,

                   his thyme,

                   his earthworm,

                   his evening dew.

He cut out his bit of sky above.

And he wrapped the garden in the sky

and the house in the garden

and paced a lo in a handkerchief

and went off

lone as an arctic fox

through the cold

unending

rain

into the world.

(Miroslav Holub, English translation by George Theiner)

Locked In

All my life I live in a coconut.
It was cramped and dark.
Especially in the morning when I had to shave.
        But what pained me most was that I had no way
to get into touch with the outside world.
If no one out there happened to find the coconut,
If no one cracked it, then I was doomed
to live all my life in the nut, and maybe die there.
       I died in the coconut.
       A couple of years later they found the coconut,
cracked it, and found me shrunk and crumpled inside.
      "What an accident!"
      "If only we had found it earlier..."
      "Then maybe we could have saved him."
      "Maybe there are more of them locked in like that..."
      "Whom we might be to save,"
they said, and started knocking to pieces every
coconut within reach.
      No use! Meaningless! A waste of time!
A person who chooses to live in a coconut!
Such a nut is one in million!
     But I have a brother-in-law who
lives in an
acorn.

Ingemar Gustafson, English Translation by Mary Swenson

Languages in the World

Something forgotten, but important. Check 'em out here !!!
The Most Language
Papua New Guinea has the greatest concentration of separate languages in the world, with more than 10 percent of the world's total of 4-5,000.

Comment: What 'bout Indonesia???? Many languages in here, but the more languages come in to Indonesia,                        the  more languages are dead.>.<


The Most Commonly Spoken
The language used by more people as their native  tongue than any other is Mnadarin, spoken by an estimated 68 percent of China's population (770 million people in 1990). The next commonly spoken language, and the most widespread, is English, with an estimated 330 million native speakers. Nearly twice as many use it as  a second or third language.

The Most Complex
Chippewa, the North American Indian language, has the most verb forms, with up to 6,000. The Inuit languages uses 63 forms of present tense.

Irregular Verbs
Turkish has only one irregular verb - olmak, meaning 'to be'. English has over 25 irregular verbs.


The Commonest Sound
No language is known to be without the vowel 'a' (as in the English word 'father".)

Alphabets
The language with the most letters is Cambodian, with 74 (including, some without any current use). Rotokas, one of Papua New Guinea's 500 languages, has the least letters, with 11 (a,b,e,g,i,k,o,p,r,t and u).


English Vocabulary
The English language contains about 490,000 words plus another 300,000 technical terms, the msot in any language, but it is doubtful if any individual uses more that 60,000. British people who had a full 16 years of education use perhaps  5,000 words in speech and up to 10,000 words in written communications. Shakespeare used a vocabulary of about 33,000 words.

Goldwynisms

Check !!!! Check !!!! Check !!!!

Sam Goldwyn was famous not only for the Hollywood films he produced but also for some amazing things he said:

" A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."
" I'll give you  a definite maybe."
" Include me out."
" Don't talk to me when I'm interrupting."
" I read part of it all the way through."
" What i want is a story that starts with an earthquake and work as a way up to climax."
" I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs."
" I may not always be right, I'm never wrong at all."
" Anybody who goes to psychiatrists ought to have their head examined."
" In two words: im-possible."
" A bachelor is no life for a single man."
" We'd do nothing for each other. We'd even cut for each other's throats for each other."
" If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive."
" Color television! I won't believe it until I see it in black and white."
" Our comedies are not to be laughed at."
" When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you."

Strange but T.R.U.E !!!!!!!!

These are things to know (read: missing things in life), i mean, remarkable information in whichever age we are. Check 'em out !!!!!!

* Bamboo can grow one meter in 24 hours.
* Napoleon was afraid of cats.... LOL ^^
* There were elephants, lions, and camels in Alaska 12,000 years ago.
* In the winters, of 1420 and 1438, wolves were found in the streets of Paris.
*If ice in the world melted, the sea would rise over 50 metrers.
* 85% of all the world's plants grow in the sea.
* Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, is heated by underground hot springs.
* Nearly 25% of the surface of Los Angeles is occupied by cars.
* 99% of all forms of life that have ever existed on the earth are now extinct.
* All US presidents have worn glasses.
* 35% of all Americans are overweight.
* Your skin weighs nearly three kilograms.
* The first parachute jump was made by a dog in a basket (belonging to the French Balloonist Blanchard) in 1785.
* Betsy, a chimpanzee at the Baltimore zoo, paints pictures, and has had 65 of them sold.
* The most common name in the world is Muhammad..... (((((Alhamdulillah))))))))