DO YOU KNOW?

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 264, 3 August 1929, Page 26

DO YOU KNOW?

1. Why lights in the distance appear to twinkle? 2. How the word banisters came? 3. Why the Pacific Ocean is so called? 4. What Chinook means? 5. Who is Big Ben? 6. Who invented blotting paper? 7. Why does a dog turn round before it lies down? 8. How fast does sound travel? 9. What are the three classes of leaves? 10. Where is Manchuria? 11. The difference in the meaning of affect and effect? 12. What is the origin of the weathercock on church steeples? 13. What is the origin of the saying: Mind your P’s and Q’s? ANSWERS 1. This is due to the changes in density or movement of the air through which the lights are seen. 2. The older spelling is baluster, and the name was given to the protecting rails of a staircase, because at first the tops were carved to resemble the pomegranate, and baluster means the flower of the wild pomegranate. 3. Magellan gave It this name in 1521 because after passing through fierce tempests in the Magellan Strait he same out into a calm ocean and traversed it without encountering a storm. 4. Chinook is the name of a warm west wind which blows from the Rockies of North America, across the prairies. 5. Big Ben is the great clock of London. 6. Nobody knows exactly, but it dates back at least to the early sixteenth century, for there is a reference to it in a book of 1579 which says: “Blottynge papyr serveth to drye weete wrythynge.” 7. The habit is a survival from the days when the dog’s ancestors were wild, lived on prairie lands, and turned round to smooth a bed for themselves in the long grass. 8. It travels at different rates through different substances. Through air at 0 degrees Centigrade, its rate is 10S6 feet a second. This rises with a rise in temperature, and at 15 degrees Centigrade the rate is 1116 feet a second. Through water the speed of sound is 4707 feet a secoud.

9. Plants show a wide range of leaf shapes, each suited to particular needs. But they may all be divided into three classes, according to the arrangement of the main ribs of their skeleton: (1) Those with several main ribs branching out finger-like from the stem. Palmate (21 Those with a single large middle rib from which smaller ribs branch out. feather like. Pinnate. (3) Those in which the ribs do not form a branching network at all, but run straight from the stem to the tip. called “paral-lel-veined.”

10. Manchuria forms the north-east-ern part of the Chinese Republic, with the Yellow Sea to the south. China proper and Mongolia to the west, Siberia to the north and east, and Korea to east and south.

11. Affect, a verb, means practise, assume, pretend, frequent, attack, move: effect, a verb, means to bring about or accomplish something. As a noun, effect means result, consequence, impression, and in plural property.

12. In the middle of the ninth century a Papal order was given for the figure of a cock to be set on every church steeple as the emblem of St. Peter, the bird being, of course, an allusion to the Apostle’s denial of his Lord and the cock crowing at the time as described in the Gospels. 13. Some think it is a reference to the danger of a printer mixing up the similar letters p and q when setting up type or distributing the letters after printing. Others think it began with French dancing masters telling their pupils to mind their p's (for pieds, feet) and q’s (for queues, wigs) when! learning to bow at a time when huge wigs were worn and might easily be disarranged if the bowing were not done carefully.