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Sometime around 1500 BC, after being hit by a terrible earthquake, the residents of Crete tried to calm the earth by lowering a large basket of olives into a well.

About one in four animals on earth is a beetle.

In Tanzania there are 125,000 people for every doctor, compared to one doctor for every 156 people in Cuba.

Asteroid 1227 is called geranium.

Novelist Joseph Conrad’s real name was Teodor Józef Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski. He became fluent in English only in his 20s. He never lost his Polish accent.

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The Great Council of Venice declared prostitution to be “absolutely indispensable to the world” in 1358, and government-funded brothels were established in major Italian cities throughout the 14th and 15th centuries.

The British Crown Jewels are not insured.

A government laboratory in Beijing uses electric eels to predict the time and location of earthquakes. In 2005, its accuracy rate was 89 percent.

Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires means “Good air”.

The Han Chinese are an ethnic group native to East Asia. They constitute approximately 20% of the entire global human population, making it the largest ethnic group in the world.

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