Fascinating Facts

Hot 'n' Cold facts

• The camel of the African Sahara desert lives in temperatures of 55 degrees centigrade. That’s a lot hotter than the average summer temperature in England which is 15 degrees.

• The King Emperor penguin of Antarctica lives in temperatures as low as –60 degrees centigrade. Remember that it only needs to fall below 0 degrees to freeze over and snow.

Sugary facts

• In the early 1500s the Aztec Emperor Montezuma of Mexico drank as many as 50 glasses of chocolate a day.

• People in Denmark eat more sweets per person than any other country, and people in Switzerland eat more chocolate than any other country.

• Confectionery began as a combination of spices and sugar and was used as an aid for upset stomachs.

• The people of Milan in Italy are said to have invented marzipan, almond paste and meringue, which began as egg whites beaten with sugar and mixed with watermelon seeds.

• Chewing gum first appeared 100 years ago when the famous general Antonia de Santa Anna, exiled to New York after the revolution in Mexico, brought ‘chicle’ with him. ‘Chicle’ is a gum extracted from sapodilla, a tree that grows in the Yucatan desert. Soon all of America was chewing gum!

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