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Sharpen Your General Knowledge
Shamim Ansary:
What Makes You Totally Different From Anyone Else In the World?
If you look down at the tips of your fingers and toes, you will see patterns of circles and swirls on the ridges of your skin. No other person in the world, living or dead, has exactly the same pattern as you, nor will anyone yet to be born. Even though your body grows and changes in many different ways, the exact patterns of circles and swirls of your fingers and toes, your fingerprints and footprints, will remain the same all your life.
You can get a clearer picture of what your prints look like by pressing your finger tips or your feet on an inked pad and then on white paper. Your prints will be reproduced in exact detail. You will see one or more of three main patterns: an arch, or small hill; a loop, or hairpin turn; or a whorl, or circular pattern. You may have all whorls or all arches, or a combination of loops and whorls or arches and loops. Not only are these prints different from anyone else’s in the world, but each of your fingers is different from the next.
Fingerprints and footprints provide foolproof identification of newborn infants by hospitals and of missing persons, amnesia victims, and criminals by police.
The FBI in Washington, D.C., has the largest collection of fingerprints on file in the world, nearly 2,000,000!
Shamim Ansary:
Where Does Sand Come From?
Grains of sand are really very tiny particles of rock. It takes time and certain kinds of weather to turn rock into sand. Rain, frost, and wind can do the job. At beaches, the tide hitting against the rocks forms sand. Salt water, too, forms sand by dissolving minerals in the rocks.
Since rocks are made up of minerals and since sand comes from rocks, you would expect to find lots of minerals in sand. There are, in fact, large quantities of quartz and also some lime, gypsum, feldspar, and even iron ore in sand.
Shamim Ansary:
What Are Minerals and How Are They Formed?
A mineral is a unique composition of elements. For instance, silicon and dioxide interact chemically to form quartz.
The most common mineral, feldspar, which makes up about half of Earth’s crust, is aluminum plus sodium, calcium, or potassium.
Minerals will separate from cooling magma and make their way through veins into surrounding rock, called ore.
Miners search for these veins to find the minerals they contain. Some veins contain single-element minerals such as copper.
Shamim Ansary:
What Plant Has the Biggest Leaves?
Can you imagine a tree as tall as a seven-story building? Sure, some trees in your neighborhood may be that tall. But can you imagine a single leaf that big?
The raffia palm is a tree that grows in the tropics of South America and Indian Ocean islands.
While the average size of most palm leaves ranges from 4 to 20 feet long and 1 to 4 feet wide, a single leaf of the raffia palm can be more than 70 feet long and 19 feet wide!
Shamim Ansary:
Which Plant Has the Biggest Seed In the World and Where Does the Seed Come From?
A tall palm tree called Lodoicea maldivicia, which grows only in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, produces the largest single seed in the world known in the plant kingdom.
The two-lobed seed can be twenty inches long.
It grows in huge fruits that look something like two coconuts joined together in an almost heart-shaped arrangement.
To the European sailors who first saw the seeds floating in the ocean, the shape was suggestive of female buttocks.
To the tourists who eventually followed, they looked like wonderful souvenirs, and the trees are threatened in the wild because local residents collect the seeds to sell.
The seeds are also much sought after by amateur palm growers, but they are not easy to cultivate. They have a very slow germination time of several years.
Eventually a shoot grows out of the seed and then goes underground.
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