Did you know? The Hogg editionFriday, July 7, 2017
To celebrate the retirement of our much beloved Head of Maths, Mr Hogg, we dedicate this week's 'Did You Know?' to his favourite animal, the rhinoceros!
- A biotech group have made a 3-D print of a rhino’s horn that is so similar to the real thing that they are going to target Chinese and Vietnamese markets to reduce demand.
- In ancient times, rhino horns were thought to have magical properties like detecting poison which they are actually able to do.
- White rhinos are thought to be named due to their mouths as in Afrikaans; “wyd” translates to “wide” and has slowly morphed into the English calling them white rhinos. The black rhinos are named to distinguish between them.
- There used to be woolly rhinos with fossils dating 3.6 million years ago, who were mostly affected by climate change and hunting from humans causing them to go extinct.
- The Indian rhino has a horn that can range from 8 inches to 3 feet long and the males can weigh as much as 3.5 tons and reach over 6 feet tall.
- Rhinos can sleep both standing and lying down.
- Conservations in South Africa are using a red dye to inject into the rhino’s horn to make it useless to poachers and also toxic for human consumption. #SaveTheRhinos
- The French word for pie chart is “camembert” because cheese…
- 10! Seconds= 6 weeks
- More than 2,000 years ago, a man named Eratosthenes approximated the circumference of the earth with a sundial and was accurate to within 2%.
- Think of a number and double it, then add 6 and halve it, now subtract it by the number you started with and you should get 3.
- The equal sign was created in 1557 when Robert Recorde, a welsh mathematician, decided he was fed up of always having to write “is equal to”.
- 2,520 is the smallest number that can be divided to give an integer by all numbers from 1 to 1
We all love rhinos and maths (maybe), which is why we are definitely going to miss Mr Hogg! We wish him the best of luck for the future and a lovely summer holiday!
Rumbidzai Nyamukapa, Lower Sixth