Recently, Reddit user u/Leefiey asked, "What is a fact or statistic that seems fake but is real?"
Here's what people said.
1. "Horses kill more people every year in Australia than all the other beasties combined. Everyone thinks it's the spiders and snakes that'll get you, but it's the horses you've really got to watch."
2. "In English, the color orange was named after the fruit. Before that, orange was just considered a shade of red. That's why gingers are called redheads."
3. "Sharks have existed longer than trees have."
4. "It took us more time to go from bronze swords to iron swords than it did for us to go from iron swords to nuclear weapons."
—u/IMJUSTABRIK
5. "If you made $100,000 a day since birth, you'd still not be worth as much as Jeff Bezos."
6. "The closest US state to Africa is Maine."
7. "Chainsaws were invented to assist with childbirth."
—u/fuzzygroodle
8. "We live closer in time to the Tyrannosaurus Rex than the T.Rex did to the Stegosaurus."
9. "Cleopatra lived closer in time to the mobile phone than she did the construction of the pyramids."
10. "Continents move at the same rate that fingernails grow. Which is also the same rate that the moon is receding from the Earth."
—u/Midnight-Ran
11. "Ted Cruz is younger than Gwen Stefani."
—u/d33jaysturf
12. "Meerkats have the highest 'homicide' rate of any mammal."
—u/ChadmeisterX
13. "Sharks are the largest threat to the internet."
—u/neohylanmay
14. "George Washington didn’t know dinosaurs existed."
—u/Silver34
15. "New Delhi hired people to hunt cobra snakes which led to people having cobra farms to earn money, then the government stopped the project which led the cobra farmers to release their snakes causing twice as many snakes than they first started."
—u/cathabit
16. "Humans can smell petrichor at a lower concentration (0.0004 parts per million) than sharks can smell blood in the water (1 part per million). If you don't know, petrichor is a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather."
17. "I once saw a scale model of the earth, moon, and sun in a museum. The sun was about the size of a basketball, and the earth was on the opposite side of the room, the size of a small marble, I'd guess about 30 meters away. The moon was the size of a tiny pinhead, about 10cm away from the earth. On this scale, the nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, wouldn't be in the same building, or even in the same city. It would be 10,000km away. And that's just one star, the nearest one to us, in a galaxy containing billions of stars, which is just one of billions of galaxies. The scale of the universe really is mind-bogglingly big. Far bigger than we can begin to comprehend."
—u/Qabbalah
What are some other facts and statistics that are real but seem fake? Share 'em in the comments below!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.