The game of horseshoe pitching

The forerunners of the game of horseshoe pitching are over 2,000 years old.

The game of quoits, played with rings instead of horseshoes, goes back to the days of ancient Greece, and was played by English peasants throughout the Middle Ages.

When some peasants couldn't find the time to fashion quoit rings, they substituted ordinary horseshoes—and that's how our game of horseshoe pitching was born.

If you fancy yourself a nifty horseshoe pitcher, you might want to try your hand at matching the current world's record for consecutive ringers-72!

The Ross Ice Shelf, a floating ice sheet attached to the continent of Antarctica, covers as much territory as the entire country of France! The ice sheet, from 500 to 1,200 or more feet thick, reaches to within 300 miles of the South Pole.

Our number system uses a set of numerals commonly referred to in the West as "Arabic numerals." These numbers were devised not by the Arabs, but by scholars in India. It was the Arabs, however, who introduced the numbers to Europe.

Astronomers have estimated that stars range in size from bodies 2,000 times as large as the sun to others as small as the moon.

There is no "weather" in the stratosphere. This region of the atmosphere, which begins about six miles above the earth, is above the clouds and the weather changes we experience occur only below.

Blizzards and rainstorms do not occur in the stratosphere, where it is still, quiet, and bitterly cold—often more than 100 degrees below zero!