by Marc Aronson
The world’s tallest building is the Burj Dubai skyscraper in Dubai … and it isn’t even finished yet. In July 2007, it became the tallest building in the world when construction reached 1,680 feet. But the builders are planning for a final height of over 2,500 feet, almost half a mile high. This would make it the tallest structure in history and twice as high as the Empire State Building. Previous “world’s tallest” were Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and New York’s World Trade Center and Empire State Building.
The world’s biggest building in terms of how much ground space it takes up is the Aalsmeer Flower Auction in the Netherlands. It covers almost 11 million square feet of space (most homes in the United States are only between one thousand and four thousand square feet). Close to 20 million flowers are sold in this building every day.
TUNNELS
The longest tunnels in the world are railroad tunnels that go underwater. Japan’s Seikan Tunnel connects two islands and is the world’s longest at 33.4 miles, of which 14.5 miles is under the seabed. The Channel Tunnel connecting England and France is the second-longest tunnel at 31 miles, but 24 of those miles are under the sea. The Channel Tunnel was dug at a depth of 150 feet under the floor of the English Channel.
The longest car tunnel is Norway’s Laerdal Tunnel, which is 15.2 miles long and cuts through a mountain. Norwegian officials were so concerned about drivers getting stressed driving through a tunnel that long that they built four huge cave sections that make drivers feel like they’re emerging into open space.
TOWERS
The CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, is the world’s tallest structure, standing 1,815 feet tall. It was designed as a TV and radio tower, although it has an observation deck on top and is a popular tourist attraction. On a clear day, visitors can see nearly 75 miles in any direction—including the mist from Niagara Falls.
The Petronius Platform, an oil-drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, is 2,001 feet high, but only 225 of that is above water.
The KVLY-TV transmitting tower in Fargo, North Dakota, is a 2,063-foot-high antenna. Since it is supported by anchor wires, the tower is not considered a freestanding structure.
ON PLANET EARTH ON PLANET EARTH
DAMS
The Rogun Dam in Tajikistan is the highest dam in the world at 1,100 feet. It sits across the Vaksh River and is constructed primarily of dirt and rock. Tajikistan is one of the smallest and poorest countries in Central Asia, and it is completely landlocked. Interestingly, the second-highest dam in the world, the Nurek Dam, is also in Tajikistan.
BRIDGES
The world’s highest bridge is the Millau Viaduct in France. At its highest point, the bridge is 1,125 feet, just slightly shorter than the Empire State Building. The distance from the roadway to the River Tarn below is 886 feet. (That’s almost the same height as the X-Scream, our vote for world’s scariest ride.)
The causeway over Lake Ponchartrain in Louisiana is nearly 24 miles from start to finish, making it the world’s longest bridge. It runs from Metairie, just outside of New Orleans, to Mandeville. The bridge is really an elevated roadway, sitting only several feet above the water on 9,000 concrete risers. Once you’re on it, you have to go all the way to the end because there is no way to turn around.
The longest suspension bridge, supported by wires and towers, is Japan’s Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge, which crosses 200 feet above the Akashi Strait. It is 6,532 feet long between its two support towers. The cables that hold up the bridge are made up of 37,000 strands of thin wire, and the total length of the cables is more than 186,000 miles—which would stretch three quarters of the way from the Earth to the moon.
PLANES
The Ukrainian An-225 Cossack is the largest airplane in the world, and was designed to carry the Soviet space shuttle in the 1990s. The Cossack has a wingspan of 291 feet (just 9 feet short of a football field), is 276 feet long, and weighs nearly 200 tons. Today, it is used for transporting incredibly heavy cargo like locomotive trains. Its wingspan is twice as long as the Wright Brothers’ first airplane.
SHIPS
The longest passenger ship ever built is the Queen Mary II, launched in 2003. It is 1,132 feet long and, if stood on its end, would be just a hundred feet shorter than the Empire State Building.
The Knock Nevis, a supertanker for transporting oil, is the world’s largest ship, with a length of 1,504 feet and a width of 226 feet. Tipped on end, it would be taller than every building in the world except for Taipei 101 and Burj Dubai. It weighs over 500,000 tons. In contrast, the average car weighs about two tons.
WALLS
The Great Wall of China is the largest structure ever created by man, running 3,948 miles from start to finish, longer than the width of the United States. The first part of the wall was begun around 500 B.C. and construction took place on and off for the next 1,000 years.
THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW (BUT PROBABLY SHOULD)
Holland is not a country. It is part of the Netherlands, although most people refer to the Netherlands as Holland. People from this country are called Dutch.
The heart of a blue whale can weigh almost a ton, or as much as a big motorcycle.
The Golden Gate Bridge is not gold, it is a dark, orange-red color. The name Golden Gate comes from the name of the water beneath it, the Golden Gate Strait—it was the water “gateway” into California from the Pacific Ocean, and resembled a similar strait in Istanbul called the Golden Horn.
Spiders are not insects. They are arachnids and have two body segments and eight legs. Insects, like ants, have three body segments and six legs.
Spit can freeze to ice in midair in certain parts of the Arctic.
Your stomach uses hydrochloric acid to break down your food. Hydrochloric acid is used to corrode steel, which means that your stomach acid could eat through the outside of a car.
The giant bullfrog of South Africa, which weighs more than four pounds, has been known to attack lions.
Your body contains 60,000 miles of blood vessels, enough to wrap around the world almost three times.
The average pencil can draw a line more than 30 miles long.
The “black box” used on airplanes to record flight information in case of an accident is actually an orange cylinder.
If you started spelling out all the numbers, the first time you would get to the letter A is at 1,000 (one thousand).
A tiger’s skin is striped exactly like its fur.
There is more computing power in a modern laptop computer than NASA had in all of the computers it used to put men on the moon in 1969.
Your body contains enough iron to make a two-inch-long nail.
The 100 Years War between France and England lasted 116 years.
An angry grizzly bear can run as fast as a horse.
Jell-O, which is a tasty gelatin food, is made from animal skins and bones. So are some glues.
Scientists know more about the visible universe than they do about how our brains work.
The first living creature sent into space was a dog named Laika. She was launched aboard Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, didn’t go up until 1961.
After frogs shed their skin, they eat it.
Glass is considered either a slow-moving liquid or a fast-moving solid, which helps explain why you can see through glass. The molecules in glass move fast enough that you can see through it (like a liquid), but move slow enough that they can be formed into shapes (like a solid).
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
The opposite sides of dice always add up to seven.
When you’re full-grown, your brain weighs as much as a jar of peanut butter.
“Pneumonoultramicro-scopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” is a word that refers to a kind of lung disease. It is the longest word in the English language. Pronounce it like this: new-moe-no-ultra-microscopic-silico-volcano-coney-oh-sis.
Chess originated in Persia (present-day Iran)
, and the word “checkmate” comes from the phrase “shah mat,” which means “the king is dead.”
The Popsicle was invented in 1905 by Frank Epperson, an 11-year-old boy. He left a soda with a stirring stick in it on his porch overnight … and it froze.
Americans eat 350 slices of pizza a second, or 17.4 million square feet per day—enough pizzas to cover a large farm or about 10 city blocks by 10 city blocks. All told, that equals three billion pizzas per year—10 pizzas for every single person in the country, including babies.
Spiders have clear blood.
The Taj Mahal, a domed building in India over 100 feet high, is not a palace. It is a mausoleum where the builder’s wife is buried.
THE SIMPLE COIN VANISH
1. Hold a coin with the thumb and first finger of your LEFT hand.
2. Drag your RIGHT hand over the coin and your LEFT hand fingers. Do this so that the fingers of your RIGHT hand face your audience.
3. Quickly close your RIGHT hand and pull it away as if snatching the coin from your LEFT hand, but don’t really grab the coin. By making the snatch-and-grab motion, and then leading the audience’s eyes with your RIGHT hand, you are creating the illusion that you have grabbed the coin with your RIGHT hand.
4. Holding your RIGHT hand up in the air, slowly open it and reveal that the coin is gone!
5. What happened is that while you dragged your RIGHT hand over the coin, you were providing a shield so that the coin could drop unseen from your fingers into the palm of your LEFT hand.
6. Some people pocket the coin in the LEFT hand while they are waving their RIGHT hand. Others quickly reach over to someone’s ear with their LEFT hand and pretend to grab the coin from there. Either way, practice makes the trick perfect.
HP NEWQUIST has authored more than a dozen books for both children and adults, including the critically acclaimed The Great Brain Book. It was cited by the National Science Teachers Association and the Children’s Book Council as one of the outstanding science books of 2006, and was named as one of the best books for young readers by the American Library Association.
To prepare for writing For Boys Only, Mr. Newquist went scuba diving with sharks in Australia, climbed the Great Wall of China, drove some really fast cars, learned a few magic tricks, and read more books than he can count.
For more, go to www.newquistbooks.com.
MARC ARONSON has the good fortune of writing and editing books on subjects he loves researching—such as American History, archaeology, sports, and, well, cool stuff for boys. His biography Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado (Clarion, 2000) won the American Library Association’s first-ever Robert Sibert Medal for excellence in nonfiction, as well as the Boston Globe—Horn Book Prize. Most recently, he went to Stonehenge to work on a book with a team of archaeologists doing new research on the site. He frequently speaks at schools, has been featured on Book TV, and maintains a blog called “Nonfiction Matters” at SLJ.com. In 2006, he served as the History Channel’s local spokesman for its Save Our History program. He lives with his wife and two sons in New Jersey.
For more, go to www.marcaronson.com.
FOR BOYS ONLY.
Copyright © 2007 by Marc Aronson and HP Newquist. Illustrations copyright © 2007 by Headcase Design.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10010.
A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK
An Imprint of Holtzbrinck Publishers
www.feiwelandfriends.com
Design by Headcase Design
Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
eISBN 9781429937030
First eBook Edition : October 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aronson, Marc.
For boys only : the biggest, baddest book ever / Marc Aronson, HP Newquist. p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37706-9
ISBN-10: 0-312-37706-1
1. Handbooks, vade-mecums, etc.—Juvenile literature. 2. Curiosities and wonders—
Juvenile literature. 3. Boys—Miscellanea—Juvenile literature. 4. Boys—Recreation—
Juvenile literature. I. Newquist, HP. II. Title.
AG106.A76 2007
031.02—dc22
2007032847
First Edition: December 2007
