Geography

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).