Let’s take a journey to Facttown, together! (These are misconceptions about places both terrestrial and extraterrestrial.)
“Holland” is another name for “the Netherlands.”
Holland was once its own country—about 400 years ago. Today, North Holland and South Holland are two provinces in the Netherlands.
Great Britain, England, and the United Kingdom all refer to the same place.
The United Kingdom is the political entity that comprises four member nations: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Great Britain is the geographical name of the landmass that contains England, Scotland, and Wales.
The King Arthur legends are England’s homegrown mythology.
The stories date back thousands of years to folk tales from Wales and France.
The Everglades is a swamp.
The Everglades is a wide, shallow, and extremely slow-moving river.
The southernmost U.S. state is Florida.
It’s the most southern of the states in the South, but Hawaii is at a lower latitude.
Maine is the easternmost U.S. state.
A few of Alaska’s outermost islands sit in the Eastern Hemisphere.
The asteroid belt is densely packed with space rocks.
On average, there’s a distance of 1.2 miles between asteroids.
Alaska is the least populated U.S. state.
Alaska has the lowest population density of all 50 states, but Wyoming has fewer total people.
There are 50 states in the U.S.A.
There are 46 states and four “commonwealths”: Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Kentucky.
The Statue of Liberty is a New York landmark.
Lady Liberty lives on Liberty Island, which sits in New York Harbor, which is inside the territorial waters of Jersey City, New Jersey.
Chicago is nicknamed the Windy City for all that blustery air blowing off adjacent Lake Michigan.
The city has historically experienced so much corruption that “Windy City” refers to its blustery, blowhard local politicians.
The Mississippi River is the longest river in North America.
The Mighty Mississippi is actually about 140 miles shorter than the Missouri River.
A toilet is the dirtiest object in the average home.
The toilet at least gets cleaned every now and then. That’s not so true for smartphones, landline phones, computer keyboards, remote controls, and doorknobs, all of which carry more germs than the commode.
Dixie is a nickname for the American South, and it’s derived from the Mason-Dixon Line, the unofficial boundary that separates the South from the North.
In the mid-1800s, Louisiana printed $10 bills emblazoned with the word dix (there was a large French influence in the state, and dix means “ten”). People called the bills “dixies,” and the use of the word took off from there.
The legendary Woodstock concert in 1969 went down in Woodstock, New York.
It happened at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York, about 40 miles away.
Daylight Saving Time was enacted to give farmers extra time to work the fields, and thus produce more food and earn more money.
Germany was the first nation to set back its clocks in 1916 in order to conserve the use of coal during World War I. The U.S. adopted the system two years later, and for the same reason: energy conservation.
Forests provide the world with most of its oxygen.
Phytoplankton, one-celled organisms that live in the ocean, generate 50 percent of the planet’s oxygen supply.
World maps provide an accurate, relative scale for the size of major landmasses.
Sizes get distorted when mapmakers try to represent a sphere as a flat object, particularly the sizes of the areas closest to the poles. Greenland and Antarctica are both much smaller than maps make them out to be, while Africa is actually much bigger than usually represented.
The island Krakatoa is east of the island Java.
Krakatoa, East of Java is the name of a 1969 disaster movie about an 1883 volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa…which is actually west of Java.
Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world.
Everest has a higher altitude, but the underwater Mauna Kea is actually a taller mountain. Only a small part of it juts up out of the Pacific Ocean in the form of an island.
There’s one South Pole.
There are four: the Geographic South Pole, the South Magnetic Pole, the Geomagnetic Pole, and the South Pole of Inaccessibility.
The Great Wall of China is so large that it’s visible from space.
It so closely blends in with its surrounding environment that it’s almost impossible to see from an orbiting spacecraft.
The Amazon rainforest is the wettest place on Earth.
Mt. Waialeale, located on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, receives more rainfall than any other location on the planet—about 500 inches a year.
Africa’s Sahara Desert is the driest place on Earth.
It doesn’t rain much in the Sahara, but it’s a rainforest compared to the Dry Valleys, a region of Antarctica that hasn’t experienced precipitation of any kind in about two million years.
Sicily is a part of Europe.
Politically, it’s a part of Italy, but geographically the island is part of the tectonic plate of Africa.
Israel is the only Jewish state in the world.
In eastern Russia, there’s a federal subject called the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
The Andes is the world’s longest mountain range.
The Mid-Atlantic Range is about twice as long. It sits in the Atlantic Ocean, and runs from Antarctica to Iceland.
The ocean floor is lined with sand.
Immediately off the coast of landmasses, the ocean floor is sandy. Farther out, the makeup of the sea floor changes. In deep ocean, sand is far less prominent than thick soil, sediment, rock, minerals, and even parts of the Earth’s crust.
Water towers store drinking water.
Not generally. Potable water comes from waterways and reservoirs, and water towers are what provide water pressure. Huge volumes of water in water towers use gravity to force the drinkable water through municipal pipes to get to where it needs to go.
Toilet water swirls down the drain the opposite way in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Coriolis effect’s forces work on a large scale, akin to gravity. It doesn’t affect water in toilets.
Foster’s is “Australian for beer.”
It’s not an Australian brand—it’s brewed in Manchester, England. It was marketed as an Australian beer in the ‘80s during a worldwide fascination with all things Australian, such as the movie Crocodile Dundee starring Paul Hogan, who also appeared in Foster’s TV commercials.
Redheaded Irish people are common, and redheads are usually of Irish descent.
Only 10 percent of Irish people are carrot-tops, but 13 percent of Scottish people are.
Catching a quick nap, or siesta, is common in Spain.
It’s fallen out of favor in modern Spain, a country that’s a big player in international economics. Many businesses still close down for a couple of hours in the afternoon, but that essentially amounts to a lunch break. Some workers may utilize that time for a nap, but it’s no longer culturally dominant to do so.
French people are rude.
Americans visiting France may think this because of a big cultural difference—in France, directness is a virtue.
English people have bad teeth.
The country’s National Health Service covers its citizens’ medical care, but not its dental care, so for decades dentistry wasn’t a priority for many. Since the 1980s, however, American-style cosmetic dentistry—orthodontics, teeth whitening—has become a regular part of life in England.
Summer happens when the Earth, in its annual revolution around the sun, gets close to the hot star.
Seasons are caused by the Earth’s tilt on its axis, not its proximity to the sun.
Black holes exert tremendous gravitational pull, aggressively sucking in anything that gets close.
A black hole possesses the same level of gravity as another celestial body of the same size.
There’s a dark side of the moon.
There’s a near side of the moon, the one that always faces the Earth due to the planet’s strong gravitational pull, and there’s a far side, which we humans don’t see much. When the moon gets between the sun and the Earth, that far side is illuminated.
Astronauts on space walks float around because there’s no gravity in space.
Space is full of gravity, particularly in the areas around Earth where astronauts work—that gravity is what keeps the moon in orbit. The astronauts’ floating comes from being in a state of very slow freefall, not a lack of gravity.
The sun is yellow.
When viewed through the Earth’s atmosphere, the sun looks yellow (or orange, or red). It’s actually white.