9 remarkable facts that sound fake but aren’t
You really couldn’t make it up.
Fiction can often circulate as fact, with urban myths straying into the public consciousness to be accepted as true – but what about the other way around, when facts sound fake but aren’t?
It’s exactly these instances which have been the hot topic of discussion on Reddit, after user Savage_303 asked their fellows to share a “true fact that sounds incredibly fake”.
Here are nine of the most popular and fact-checked answers, to show that sometimes you really couldn’t make it up.
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Seattle in the US’s North-West corner to Miami in its South-East corner is a 5,345 km (3,321 mile) drive according to Google maps.
They say “one teaspoon of water contains about three times as many atoms as the Atlantic Ocean contains teaspoons of water”.
The largest ocean in the world is the Pacific which, along with the Indian, Southern and Arctic oceans, make a total body of water of over four times the size of the Atlantic, the second-largest.
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That works out as 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 different permutations – a number so large it is actually highly unlikely you will shuffle the cards in a way that has been done before.
The platypus and some other species such as carp lost their stomachs in their evolutionary past – instead, their gullet connects directly to their intestines.
