Here are a few common questions that have surprisingly uncommon answers. They will hopefully inspire you to read and research, so that you replace myth with reality.
Which is the tallest mountain in the world?
Not Mount Everest which — at 29029 — ft is the highest but not the tallest. The current convention is that ‘highest’ means ‘measured from sea level to summit’. ‘Tallest’ means ‘measured from the bottom of the mountain to the top’. This is why Mauna Kea is the highest point. It is situated in the island of Hawaii. This inactive volcano is only 13,799 feet above sea level, but when measured from the seabed to its summit is 33,465 feet high – about three-quarters of a mile higher than Mount Everest.
Who said during the French revolution of 1789, ‘Let them eat cake’?
Wrong if you answered ‘Marie Antoinette’. The first thing to be noted is that the word used was ‘brioche’ and not ‘cake’. Brioche is really ordinary bread, only slightly enriched with butter and eggs. When the Queen saw the poor rioting, she was probably moved by their suffering and really meant to say, ‘If they want bread, give them some of the good stuff.’
It is also likely that she did not say this at all. The remark was used as early as 1760, much before her time, to point to aristocratic decadence. Rousseau, the French philosopher and writer, claimed to have heard it way back in 1740.
What colour is water?
The usual answer is that it is colourless. It is transparent and the sea only appears blue because of the reflection of the sky. On the other hand, water is really blue. You can see this in Nature when you look into a deep hole in the snow or through the thick ice of a frozen waterfall. If you took a very large and deep, white pool, filled it with water and looked straight down through it, the water would be blue.
What is coffee made from?
Not from coffee beans, but from coffee seeds. Coffee is a fruit and what we call beans are really seeds. Coffee trees produce delicate, white flowers. These flowers give way to bright red fruit whose flesh is sweet. Right inside are two bluish green seeds. The word ‘bean’ once meant only the seed of broad beans. Later came others like the haricot beans and the runner bean. They belong to the Phaseolus family. The coffee tree is actually an Evergreen.
What were Cinderella’s slippers made of?
Not glass as you probably believe, but squirrel fur. Charles Perrault, who wrote the popular version of the story in the Seventeenth Century, misheard ‘vair’ (squirrel fur), in the medieval tale he borrowed and rewrote, for ‘verre’ (glass). There are more than 340 other versions before Perrault’s. None of them mention glass slippers.