Everyday Life
29 questions tagged Everyday Life — spanning every one of the seven Ws.
What is a credit score?
A credit score is a number that estimates how likely a person is to repay borrowed money, based on their history of loans, credit cards and bill payments.
What is a QR code?
A QR code is a square two-dimensional barcode that stores information such as a web link, which a phone camera can read instantly.
Which surname is the most common in the world?
Wang and Li are the most common surnames in the world, each shared by roughly 100 million people in China.
Which dog breed is the most popular?
The French Bulldog is the most popular dog breed in the US, ending the Labrador Retriever 31-year reign in 2022.
How do credit cards work?
A credit card lets you borrow money from a bank to pay for purchases, which you repay later, with interest if you do not pay the full balance on time.
How does facial recognition work?
Facial recognition detects a face, measures its unique features, turns them into a mathematical faceprint and compares it with stored faces.
How does daylight saving time work?
Daylight saving time moves clocks forward one hour in spring and back one hour in autumn to shift daylight into the evening.
Why are school buses yellow?
School buses are yellow because a 1939 conference in the United States chose a bright yellow-orange that is easy to spot in dim light and in the corner of the eye, and it became the national standard.
Why are soaps good at removing grease?
Soap molecules have one end that likes water and one end that likes fat. That lets them surround grease and lift it away in tiny droplets.
Why can salt melt ice on roads?
Salt lowers the freezing point of water, so ice can melt at temperatures below 0°C. The brine solution is harder to freeze than pure water.
Why does chewing gum lose its flavour?
The sweeteners and flavourings in gum dissolve in saliva and get swallowed. What stays in your mouth is the gum base, which is designed not to dissolve and has almost no taste of its own.
What is the plastic tip on a shoelace called?
It is called an aglet. It stops the lace from fraying and makes it easy to thread through the eyelets of a shoe.
When was the toothbrush invented?
The first bristle toothbrush is recorded in China in 1498, made of coarse hog hairs set in bone or bamboo. William Addis began mass-producing toothbrushes in England after 1780, and nylon bristles arrived in 1938.
Where did bubble wrap come from?
Hawthorne, New Jersey, in 1957. Engineer Alfred Fielding and Swiss chemist Marc Chavannes sealed two plastic shower curtains together to make textured 3-D wallpaper, trapping air bubbles by accident. The wallpaper flopped, but the bubbles turned out to be perfect for packaging.
Which came first: the colour orange or the fruit?
The fruit. In English, 'orange' named the fruit from about the 13th century, and the first recorded use of 'orange' as a colour is from 1502. Before that, people said things like 'yellow-red' or 'saffron'.
Whose idea was the paper clip?
Nobody knows for sure. The familiar double-loop 'Gem' clip was never patented and its designer is unknown. It is often credited to Norwegian Johan Vaaler, but his 1899 design was different and was never made.
How does an eraser remove pencil marks?
Pencil marks are tiny flakes of graphite resting on the paper fibres. An eraser is slightly sticky, so the graphite clings to it more than to the paper, and the crumbs carry it away.
Why do we shake hands?
The most popular explanation is that an open right hand showed you were not holding a weapon. The up-and-down shaking may even have been a way to dislodge a dagger hidden in a sleeve.
What is the tiny hole in a pen cap for?
It is a safety feature. If a child swallows the cap and it gets stuck in the airway, the hole lets some air pass through. An international standard for pen caps calls for it.
When was the fork invented?
Forks for cooking and serving are ancient, but eating forks spread slowly. When a Byzantine princess used a golden fork in Venice around 1004, church critics called it sinful vanity. They only became common in Europe in the 1600s and 1700s.
Which side of aluminium foil should you use?
Either side works. The shiny and dull sides come from manufacturing, and the difference in how they reflect heat is too small to matter in normal cooking. The only exception is non-stick foil, where the coated side should face the food.
Whose idea was the shopping trolley?
Sylvan Goldman, who owned the Humpty Dumpty supermarkets in Oklahoma City, introduced it in 1937. Shoppers refused to use it at first, so he hired people to push trolleys around the store until customers followed.
How does glue actually stick?
Glue works through two forces. Adhesion makes it cling to each surface it touches, and cohesion holds the glue itself together once it sets. Super glue hardens when it meets traces of water.
Why do paper cuts hurt so much?
Paper cuts almost always land on your fingertips, which hold one of the densest concentrations of pain-sensing nerve endings in the body. The cut is shallow so it barely bleeds, leaving those nerves exposed, and paper's ragged edge tears the skin rather than slicing it cleanly.
When did people start putting candles on birthday cakes?
The custom is usually traced to Germany in the 1700s, where a children's birthday celebration called Kinderfest featured a cake topped with lit candles. Sweet birthday cakes in their modern form spread later, in the 1800s.
Where does the high five come from?
The modern high five is usually traced to US professional sport in the late 1970s. The best-known origin story places it between Los Angeles Dodgers baseball players Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke in 1977.
Whose invention was the windshield wiper?
The windshield wiper was invented by Mary Anderson, an American woman who patented a hand-operated wiper in 1903 after watching a streetcar driver struggle to see through sleet.
How does a candle burn?
The flame's heat melts the wax, which is drawn up the wick by capillary action, turns to vapour, and then burns in the air. It is the wax vapour that burns, not the wick itself.
What was Play-Doh originally invented for?
Play-Doh was first sold as a wallpaper cleaner. The soft, pliable putty was rolled over walls to lift off the soot left by coal and wood heating, and it only became a toy years later when that market collapsed.