Hobson's choice
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Your support makes all the difference.Number of euros put into bank accounts by the French government for the 1,500 French babies born on New Year's Day: 100
Value in dollars of a suitcase full of $100 notes: 1m
Dollar equivalent of a purse full of 500 euro notes: 1m
Number of translation permutations if nine languages are spoken at meetings of the European Union: 72
Percentage of Chaucer's vocabulary that was French: 14
Number of members of the 15th Lord of Stafford's family who have had their heads chopped off in the 600 years since they became peers: 3
Number of times St Mark's Square in Venice flooded in 1900: 7
Number of times St Mark's Square in Venice flooded in 1996: 99
Acres of North Yorkshire Moors covered by bracken, the toxic and carcinogenic properties of which have led Jim Taylor, the Emeritus Professor of Geography at Aberystwyth University, to recommend face masks when the bracken casts its spoors in August: 14,000
Number of galaxies whose approximate distance from our own was known by astronomers in 1970: 2,000
Number of galaxies whose approximate distance from our own was known by astronomers in 1994: 100,000
Number of copies of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album sold in the US a week: 25,000
Time, in seconds, it takes light to travel from the sun to the earth: 492
Number of seconds it should take a teaspoon of granulated sugar to sink through the crema (foam) of a perfectly brewed espresso: 3
Amount of energy, in ergs, released by pronouncing an average syllable of a word: 200
Amount of energy, in ergs, released by a foot fall: 14 million
Number of people still receiving survivors' benefits from the US Department of Veterans Affairs for the Spanish-American War, which began and ended in 1898: 810
SOURCES: Asian Times, Linguist, Outlook, Art Newspaper, Yorkshire Evening Post, Whole Shebang: Timothy Ferris, Xfm, People's Almanac, Lavazza, Atlantic Monthly
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