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The Rio de Janeiro Carnival in Brazil is the world’s biggest street party, with more than 2 million
people packing the streets. London’s Notting Hill Carnival in England is the second largest.
The first map to name the newly discovered
continent America was drawn by German
cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1507.Fewer than 100 people still
speak Votic, a language of
northern Russia.
Over 700 languages are spoken in Indonesia.Australians eat more
meat than anyone else.
Two million people converge on the holy city
of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, each year during the
week of the Muslim pilgrimage called the hajj.The oldest known map
was drawn around 2,500 bce
on a clay tablet in Babylonia, in
modern-day Iraq, showing the
area around the River Euphrates.
80
per cent of the world’s
toys
are made in
China
.
About 1 billion people do
not have enough to eat.
Iceland’s Althing is the oldest parliament in
the world. Its first meeting was held in 930 ce.In 1978, Argentinian Emilio Marcos Palma
became the first person to be born in Antarctica.About 4,000 people, mainly
scientists, live in Antarctica
in the summer. This number
drops to 1,000 in the winter.Absolute monarchies are states that are ruled
directly by a hereditary leader. Saudi Arabia,
Brunei, Oman, and Swaziland are the only
absolute monarchies that survive today.The Trans-Siberian railway runs from St Petersburg
in the west to Vladivostok in the east. It is 9,288 km
(5,772 miles) long and goes through eight different
time zones, without ever leaving Russia.The widest avenue in the world is
Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires,
Argentina. It has 12 lanes of traffic.
Experts predict that India
will overtake China
as the most populous
nation on Earth by 2030.
There are more than 30 megacities
with more than 10 million
inhabitants in the world.The first
country to
give women
the vote was
New Zealand
in 1893.
Russia, the largest country by area,
is almost twice the size of the
second largest, Canada.At any given time of day, there are more than a
million people in the air somewhere in the world.There are 1 billion bicycles
in the world, 400 million
of them in China.
The United Nations was formed by
51 countries in 1945. It now has 193
members since Montenegro joined
in 2006.There are 55 different ethnic groups
in China besides the Chinese.The first mobile phone network was launched in Sweden in 1956.
The world’s busiest airport
is Atlanta in the USA. More
than 88 million people pass
through its doors each year.About half the world’s
people regularly eat insects.
About 2,000 different species
appear on the menu.FOR MORE AMAZING PEOPLE AND PLACES, SEE PAGES 190–225292_293_PeopleFacts.indd 293 14/03/19 9:54 AM