John Bernhisel

Questions:

1. Lake Baikal in Russia is the deepest lake on Earth. What is the deepest lake in the United States?

2. What is the sum of all the numbers on a standard six-sided die?

3. What two countries share the world’s longest international border?

4. Which 1954 Ernest Hemingway book won him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature?

5. What bestselling book series features a middle school student named Greg Heffley?

Fun Facts: 

Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II were both born in 1926. 

Greenland sharks are believed to reach sexual maturity at around 150 years of age. Scientists estimate that some can live for nearly 400 years.

Top professional basketball players in Europe’s top league can earn several million dollars a season.

Germany’s V-2 rockets, developed during World War II, burned a fuel mixture of approximately 75% ethyl alcohol and 25% water, along with liquid oxygen. Because so many people were drinking the rocket fuel they had to add a poison.

When Harriet Tubman was born, Thomas Jefferson was still alive. When she died, Ronald Reagan had already been born.

Olivia Newton-John’s maternal grandfather was Max Born, a German-Jewish physicist who helped develop quantum mechanics and won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics.

During the 1920s, Americans could purchase a radioactive health drink called Radithor. Wealthy businessman Eben Byers drank more than 1,000 bottles before dying of radiation poisoning in 1932. His body was buried in a lead-lined coffin.

Doctors once deliberately infected patients suffering from advanced syphilis with malaria because the high fevers could help fight the disease. They then treated the malaria with quinine. Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the treatment.

A blue whale’s tongue can weigh as much as an adult elephant!

Lisa Kudrow was the oldest of the six Friends actors when the show premiered in 1994, and Matthew Perry was the youngest. Their ages at the premiere were Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston, 25; Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer, 27; Courteney Cox, 30; and Lisa Kudrow, 31.

Answers:

1. Lake Baikal in Russia is approximately 5,387 feet deep. Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest lake in the United States at 1,943 feet.

2. The numbers 1 through 6 add up to 21. (On a standard die, opposite sides always add up to seven.)

3. The United States and Canada share 5,525 miles of border.  (Alaska is 1,538 miles of that total)

4. "The Old Man and the Sea." Published in 1952.

5. "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," by Jeff Kinney. (More than 300 million copies have been sold.)