297
An
estimated
1.5 billion people
watched the 1985
charity concert
Live Aid on
television.
The first permanent photograph
was taken by French inventor
Nicéphore Niépce in 1826.
It needed eight hours of
exposure time.
The slowest musical tempo is called larghissimo,
Italian for as slow as possible. The fastest is
prestissimo, meaning as fast as possible.The drawings of animals on
cave walls in Chauvet, France,
are approximately 36,000
years old.The world’s largest
statue is the
statue of Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel,
one of the heroes of
India’s independence
movement. The statue
stands 182 m (600 ft) tall in
the state of Gujarat, India.The fastest ball game in
the world is pelota,
played in the Basque
region of northern Spain
and southern France. The
ball can move at up to
300 km/h (185 mph).
Athletics was the first sport to hold organized
competitions. The first such event probably took
place in Ancient Greece 5,000 years ago.Over its 21 separate
stages, 12 million people
came out to watch the
Tour de France bicycle
race in 2017.
The English language has about 500,000
words, compared to 185,000 in German and
100,000 in French.In May 1990, Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh’s painting Portrait of Dr Gachet
sold for £49 million. In his lifetime, he was unable to make a living from his art.
Italian artist Michelangelo spent five years,
between 1536 and 1541, painting Biblical scenes
on the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.In 1872, Austrian composer Johann Strauss
conducted an orchestra of 987 musicians and
a choir of 19,000 singers in Boston, USA.In December 2006, the
Netherlands became the first
country to switch off its
analogue TV signal, forcing everyone
to use digital receivers.The lowest voice in opera singing is called
a basso profundo, Italian for “deep bass”.The term for actor, thespian, comes
from the first actor known to history,
Thespis from Ancient Greece.The first museum to open its doors to the public
was the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, in 1591.In the 1930s, German company Blütner made
a baby grand piano out of aluminium and
pigskin, so that it would be light enough
to be carried in an airship. It weighed
180 kg (397 lb).The best-selling album of all time is Thriller
by US pop star Michael Jackson, with an
estimated 66 million copies.The first compact disc went on sale in 1982.
La Scala opera house
in Milan, Italy, has
3,600 seats.
It is now possible to watch more than 2,000
different TV channels from around
the world online.On 31 December
1994, British pop
singer Rod
Stewart played
a concert on
Copacabana
Beach, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, to an estimated
3,500,000 New Year’s
Eve revellers.
The practice of awarding caps for international sports
appearances started in England in 1886. Footballers
in their first international were presented with a white
silk cap with a red rose on the front.The highest paid sportsman
of the 21
st
century isMichael Jordan,
with earnings of
around $1.85
billion.
The marathon is a race
run over a distance of
42.195 km (26.218 miles).
This is the distance Greek
soldier Pheidippides ran without
stopping from the town of Marathon
to Athens in 490 bce to announce victory in
battle over the Persians.LEARN MORE ABOUT ART AND CULTURE ON PAGES 252–279
Walt
Disney was
nominated for
64 Oscars and
won 26 , more
than anyone in
history.
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