100 things we learned in 2015

Marketing Society editor, Elen Lewis on the 100 things we learned in 2015 from the world's favourite colour to hiraeth - the Welsh word that means a sad longing for your homeland.

1. The ad executive behind the Nike slogan, ‘Just Do It’ got the idea from the final words of condemned murderer Gary Gilmore.
2. The word ‘budget’ comes from the French ‘bouge’ and before that the Latin ‘bulga’ and before that the Celtic word ‘bolg’ - it meant a bag or sack.
3. Chess started as a 6th century game which had ‘elephants’, ‘chariots’ and ‘infantrymen’.
4. The ocean economy is valued at $24tn, the seventh largest in the world.
5. Printing out the entire internet - not including the dark web - would require about eight million trees.
6. China has more vineyards than France.
7. Tattoos can cause Apple's smartwatch to malfunction, as the ink interferes with the device's sensor.
8. In 1965 a US Senate Committee predicted that by the year 2000 the average working week would be 14 hours.
9. On average, countries with the highest chocolate consumption also have the most Nobel Prize winners.
10. Hiraeth is a Welsh word that means a sad longing for your homeland.
11. China is home to more billionaires than the US.
12. Puffins are now as endangered as the African elephant.
13. Processed meats such as bacon, sausages and ham do cause cancer.
14. The first humans to leave Africa went to China not Europe.
15. Using long, complicated words makes you appear less intelligent than if you use simple language.
16. China's best Obama impersonator cannot speak English.
17. The best way to remember a name is to say it to someone else.
18. Traditional societies sleep on average for six hours and 25 minutes.
19. The suffragettes learnt the ancient martial art of jiu-jitsu.
20. A third of vegetarians eat meat when drunk on a night out.
21. UK officials discussed plans to relocate the entire 5.5 million population of Hong Kong to Northern Ireland in 1983.
22. People with blue eyes are more likely to have an alcohol addiction.
23. One in 15 women in Chad die in childbirth, compared to one in 6,900 women in the UK.
24. In the 1930s and 1940s, 7-Up included lithium citrate as a mood-booster.
25. A tennis player can produce up to three litres of sweat an hour.
26. Indians - most of them Sikhs - currently make up about 60% of Italy's Parmesan-producing workforce.
27. Only 83 black women have ever received a PhD in physics in the US.
28. Saudi Prince Alwaweed bin Talal's $32 billion donation could educate 5,614,035 girls in Africa to the age of 16.
29. Mustard is the by-product of millions of years of evolutionary ‘warfare’ between plants and butterflies.
30. A 2011 study by a Swiss university showed that stockbrokers are more reckless and manipulative than diagnosed psychopaths.
31. A big storm cloud weighs as much as 200,000 elephants.
32. Professional dog walkers in the UK are earning an average of £26,500 - more than nurses.
33. The worst times to drink coffee are between 08:00-09:00, 12:00-13:00 and 17:30-18:30. The best is about an hour after waking up, regardless of the time.
34. Apple's new design chief Jony Ive holds 5,000 patents.
35. The US is home to 46 million international migrants almost 20% of the global total.
36. A group of ducks on the water is called a paddling.
37. British people reach job contentment at 32 - after an average of three job moves.
38. South African President Jacob Zuma's state-funded £215,000 swimming pool at his home was for ‘security’.
39. The average British worker spends 36 days a year answering work emails.
40. More than 90% of presidents and prime ministers are male but boys in the developed world are 50% more likely to flunk basic maths, reading and science.
41. Romantic kissing is practised in fewer than half of the world's cultures.
42. People feel significantly happier and their blood pressure comes down when they spend time in aquariums.
43. Sanitary towels in Venezuela sell for £140.
44. People are prepared to spend more on toilet roll, light bulbs and toothbrushes when they are listening to country music.
45. There are four main personality types into which people can be categorised when drunk: ‘Mary Poppins’, ‘Hemmingway’, ‘Nutty Professor’ and ‘Mr Hyde’.
46. Music fans in Finland can get refunds from disappointing concerts.
47. British people are 16 times more likely to know the rules of Quidditch than of croquet.
48. Dr Seuss invented the word ‘nerd’.
49. The word ‘email’ dates back to the 1500s, when it referred to a glossy paint used to decorate pottery.
50. Froth drunk from the mouth of a camel was an ancient contraceptive.
51. Burma is the most charitable country: 91% of Burmese people regularly give money to charity.
52. John Frenchman is likely to have been the most common name given to medieval migrants coming to England.
53. Roughly 56% of average monthly earnings in Malawi are spent on mobile phone charges, compared to about 0.11% in Macau, China.
54. Penguins can't taste fish, only bitter and umami flavours.
55. YouTube star Grumpy Cat earned more than Gwyneth Paltrow in 2014.
56. In 1896, Shredded Wheat's manufacturers recommended serving it with melted cheese, oysters or poached eggs on top.
57. A cheetah can go from 0 to 40mph in three strides.
58. Iceland has 25 puffins for every person.
59. Artificial intelligence can teach a machine how to win Atari video games.
60. Main characters are more likely to die in children's cartoons than in films for adults.
61. The global market for luxury goods grew by 36% over the last five years to $338 billion.
62. MACROVERBUMSCIOLIST - is the word for someone who pretends to know a word, then secretly looks it up.
63. In rural Nigeria, some believe that if a mother eats snails it can make the baby sluggish.
64. It would take 38 minutes to journey through the centre of the earth to the other side of the world - four minutes faster than thought.
65. Costa Rica runs entirely on renewable energy.
66. There is only one concert grand piano in Gaza.
67. In Burmese culture, it is considered embarrassing for a man to hold an umbrella for a woman.
68. It would take 136 billion sheets of A4 paper to print out the entire internet.
69. Most white British people owe nearly a third of their DNA to German ancestry.
70. Filmgoers eat 55% more popcorn when watching a sad film, compared to when watching a comedy.
71. In 1934, Disney’s writing team made a list of 50 potential names for the seven dwarfs, including Biggo-Ego, Flabby, Awful & Chesty.
72. People asked Google, "What is 0 divided by 0?" in 2015 more than "What is Isis?"
73. People who swear have larger vocabularies.
74. In China, the man in the moon is known as the toad in the moon.
75. Employees who say they love following the rules are the ones who are most likely to be fired for breaking them.
76. Japan's medical schools have more corpses than they know what to do with.
77. A group of ducks on the water is called a paddling.
78. The most borrowed book from the Houses of Parliament library is called 'How Parliament Works'.
79. Women are almost two-thirds more likely than men to believe in God.
80. Ulaia is an old Hawaiian word meaning ‘to live like a hermit because of disappointment’.
81. People spend 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing.
82. The average life of a web page is about a hundred days.
83. In Ohio, it's illegal to disrobe in front of a man's portrait.
84. Jamaica, Colombia and Saint Lucia are the only countries in the world where a woman is more likely to be a boss than a man.
85. In 2004, 24% of households in China owned a fridge. Ten years later this had shot up to 88%.
86. 51% of people in England and Wales are single.
87. Proust got out of bed between 3pm and 6pm each day and had opium for breakfast.
88. Some 15,152 types of life forms have been identified on the New York subway.
89. Chinese internet users are banned from posting messages using the names of famous people.
90. A 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson has edited Wikipedia 47,000 times to remove the ungrammatical term ‘comprised of’.
91. ‘Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms by making mushroom cultivation scientific, intensive and industrialised!’ is an official slogan of North Korea.
92. The religious goods business in Italy is estimated to be worth about £3.4bn ($5.2bn) - more than the country earns from exporting wine.
93. Millionaires' biggest regret is having made a mistake in a relationship with their family.
94. The modern strawberry was born after a French spy brought back a South American species from Chile in 1712.
95. The world's favourite colour is blue.
96. North Korean textbooks say Kim Jong Un learned to drive when he was three.
97. Croquet was dropped as an Olympic sport after the 1900 games because only 1 spectator had turned up to watch.
98. A group of hippos is called a bloat.
99. Rhinoceros horn is more valuable in weight than gold, diamonds or cocaine.
100. UK Diplomatic Service officials discussed relocating the entire population of Hong Kong (5.5 million people) to Northern Ireland in 1983.

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