Geography

It is a canal cut between Port Said and the Suez in Egypt, which joins the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.

It was engineered by a French Engineer and diplomat named Ferdinand de Lesseps.  It took 10 years to build from 1859-1869.

The Suez is over 160km (100 miles) long.

The lowest point on land is the shoreline of the Dead Sea in Israel, which is 1,310 feet below sea level.

The southern shore of the Dead Sea has salt caves purported to be in the area where the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were once located.

The salt water of the Dead Sea has a higher concentration of minerals than other bodies of water and contains more than 25 minerals.   The water has therapeutic value since ancient times.  In addition, the air is pure and dry and has the richest oxygen content in the world.

It’s been claimed that Aristotle and Cleopatra, among others, went there to be cured.  Even today, people go to the Dead Sea to relieve athritis, rheumatism,  and other ailments.

The area around the Dead Sea has over 300 days of sun per year but rarely more than 2 inches of rain annually.  Therefore, the water level of the Dead Sea drops almost 6 feet a year due to evaporation, which often creates a thick mist over the water.

The rocky cliffs that rise steeply 400 feet above the Dead Sea hold the remnanats of Massada, the impregnable fortress built by King Herod.

They say there are three possible answers to this question. So have a look and see what you think of each of them below…

1. In 1909 Edward S.Martin wrote in his book, The Wayfarer in New York: “New York was merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other. But the Big Apple (New York) gets a disproportionate share of the national sap”.

2. In Spanish, the word Manzana can mean ‘block’ (a small section of a town or city) or ‘apple’. So when immigrants referred to New York as ‘the Big Block’, people thought they were calling it the ‘Big Apple’.

3. Some say it derives from jazz musicians slang. In the 1920s they used to refer to gigs as ‘apples’ and New York was of course, the big apple. The phrase was also used in other walks of life, for example, a newspaper sports writer John J. FitzGerald heard it and called his racing column ‘Around the Big Apple’ which would indeed have helped to popularize the expression.

Believe it or not it was Coventry!

Coventry is a city and metropolitan borough in the county of West Midlands in England and it was twinned with Stalingrad (now Volgograd) during the Second World War.

It was not just the first twinning for a British city, but for any two cities across the world.

It came about when women from Coventry embroidered their names on a huge tablecloth and sent it to the women of Stalingrad – a city that was under-siege by the Germans.  From that start the two cities became twinned.

After the war, Coventry, a city which was devastated by German bombs, was twinned with Dresden, which had likewise been destroyed by the Allies, in an act of reconcilliation.

Well the highest and longest mountain range in North America are the Rockies.

They stretch for 4,800 km (3,000 miles) through Canada and the USA.

The actual highest point in North America is Mount McKinley (Denali) in Alaska, USA which stands at 6,194 metres (20,320 ft).