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- Mongolia is the largest landlocked country.
- The national anthem of the Netherlands "Het Wilhelmus," is an 'acrostichon.' The first letters of each of the fifteen verses represent the name "Willem Van Nassov."
- Toronto’s original name was York, but it had another name long before that. The area near the shores of Lake Ontario was called "the meeting place" by the Ojibway of Southern Ontario. Their word: Toronto.
- US Route 66 ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, approximating the course of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, a railroad which, we might mention, no longer goes to any of those three towns.
- There are more Irish in New York City than in Dublin, Ireland; more Italians in New York City than in Rome, Italy; and more Jews in New York City than in Tel Aviv, Israel.
- There are more people in New York City (7,895,563) than there are in the states of Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Hawaii, Delaware, and New Mexico combined.
- The smallest country in Central America is El Salvador.
- Adolf Hitler had planned to change the name of Berlin to Germania.
- Persia changed its name to Iran in 1935.
- Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States in 1789.
- The country of Costa Rica does not have an army.
- The Philippines consist of 7,100 islands.
- The first people to arrive on Iceland were Irish explorers, in 795 A.D.
- The royal house of Saudi Arabia has close to 10,000 princes and princesses.
- When the Eiffel Tower was built in 1884, Parisians referred to it as "the tragic lamppost" and nearly universally hated it.
- The Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. has 365 steps, representing every day of the year.
- The twin towers of New Yorks World Trade Center contain 208 elevators. Elevators rank as the safest form of transportation, boasting only one fatality every 100 million miles traveled. Stairs, in comparison, are five times more dangerous.
- Ellis Island opened to begin the processing of what would amount to more than 20 million immigrants to the United States in 1892. The immigration center was also used as a deportation station, and later, a Coast Guard Station, and then, a national park. Ellis Island is now a museum.
- Residents of the Havasupai Indian Reservation in Northern Arizona get their mail delivered by mule.
- Los Angeles and San Francisco become 2.5 inches closer together each year because they are on opposite sides of the San Andreas fault.
- Australia's new parliament house in the nation's capital Canberra is one of the largest buildings in the southern hemisphere. The building covers nearly 15 per cent of a 32 hectare site and boasts 4500 rooms. Its floor space is approximately 250,000 square meters.
- Forty six percent of the world's water is in the Pacific Ocean. The Atlantic has 23.9 percent; the Indian, 20.3; the Arctic, 3.7 percent.
- The state of Oregon has one city named Sisters and another called Brothers. Sisters got its name from a nearby trio of peaks in the Cascade Mountains known as the Three Sisters. Brothers was named as a counterpart to Sisters.
- South Africa produces two-thirds of the world's gold.
- St. Petersburg, FL once had 427 consecutive days of sunshine.
- The smallest island with country status is Pitcairn in Polynesia, at just 1.75 sq miles/4,53 sq km.
- The volume of water in the Amazon river is greater than the next eight largest rivers in the world combined.
- Surprisingly, there was a time that the Vatican owned shares of the Watergate complex in Washington DC, the Pan American building in Paris, and the Hilton hotel in Rome.
- If global warming forecasts are true, the island country of Tuvalu might cease to exist within 100 years.
- Pennsylvania has more covered bridges than any other state. Vermont, a much smaller state, claims a greater density of covered bridges. (More bridges per square mile). Parke County, Indiana, claims more covered bridges than any other county, but Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, comes in second.
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