What caused the Great Vowel Shift? It was a very large change in pronunciation that happened in England between 1400 and 1700. Nobody knows exactly what caused it. If you try to read Chaucer’s Canterbury tales, you will be able to string the letters together into words and you can probably understand what quite a […]
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Why do we die so quickly without water? Our bodies need water for so many processes and that means it needs a steady supply of water going in to balance the water going out. There is a saying that a human can go three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, and three weeks without
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Can we eat insects? Yes. In fact, not only can we eat insects, but we should eat insects. They are nutritious, easy to grow, and not bad for the environment. The average human needs between 1,600 calories to 3,000 calories, depending on our gender and our body size. Those calories need to be roughly 60%
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Why do salmon swim upstream? They return to the place they were born to lay their eggs. Salmon are born in freshwater streams. The adult salmon lay eggs in the sand and gravel at the bottom of the river, which hatch and become baby salmon, which are called alevins. The alevins still have a yolk
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Why is an Academy Award called an Oscar? There are many theories, but no one knows the actual reason why. The Academy Awards are awarded once a year, usually in February or March. They are the most important and coveted of all the awards for movies. They are watched by millions of people around the
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What did the peppered moth do? It changed from a light color to a dark color during the Industrial Revolution. The peppered moth is native to most places in the northern hemisphere. They are about 5.5 cm with their wings spread out. They fly at night and they are generally a mix of light colors
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How many different eye colors do people have? There are only 6 different eye colors. They are amber, blue, brown, gray, green, and hazel. There are many different colored eyes in the animal kingdom, but humans are far more limited in eye color than we think. Out of the six colors, brown is the most
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Why was the Great Wall of China built? It was built to protect the territory of the new Chinese empire, to protect the silk road, because the labor was available, the emperor wanted to be remembered, and as a show of power. The official length of the Great Wall of China is 21,196.18 km long.
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What is DDT? It stands for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane and was the first synthetic pesticide. It was banned in 1972. DDT didn’t start being used in large quantities until after the Second World War, but it had been discovered quite a while earlier. Othmar Zeidler, an Austrian chemist, first synthesized DDT in 1874. Nobody realized that it
How does a cheetah run so fast? It is a combination of their body weight, their claws, their spine, their joints, the type of muscles they have, their tail, their organs, and the size of their head and skeleton. Cheetahs are the fastest land animals. They have a top speed of approximately 113 km/h and
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