Kids Questions & Answers

On 15 September 1830 a train steamed slowly from Liverpool along the new ‘iron road’ to Manchester – the first in a procession of eight locomotives. The occasion was the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first railway in the world to carry goods and passengers. Cheering crowds greeted the Duke of Wellington as his luxurious coach was …

The Pacific Ocean has the greatest average depth which is 4,281 meter the deepest spot is also in the Pacific Ocean. It is 10,790 meters deep. The second deepest spot is in the Atlantic Ocean. It measures 9,219 meter. But as far as average depth is concerned, Indian Ocean has the second place with a depth of 3,963 meter.

The nut of the coco de mer, also called giant fan palm, double coconut, Seychelles nut, or Maldive coconut, is considered to be the biggest nut in the entire plant kingdom. It is the size of a coconut, and weighs around 27 kg. The palm is found only in the islands of Praslin and Curieuse of Seychelles in the Indian …

William Dampier was a Somerset man who turned pirate, although the ships and town he plundered were usually Spanish. In January 1688 he was second-in-command of a ship called the Cygnet when the coast of New Holland – as Australia was then called – came in sight. The ship was run into a bay to be careened, and Dampier went …

The Most Noble Order of the Garter, the highest British Order of Knighthood, is as sought-after and honoured now as it was over six hundred years ago. The exact date of the foundation of the order, which John Selden, the historian, described as exceeding ‘in majesty, honour and fame all Chivalrous Orders of the World’, is uncertain. One version tells …

The British Navy’s nickname for a torpedo is ‘tin fish’. It is an underwater powered projectile which can be launched from a ship, submarine or aeroplane to explode against a hostile ship. Robert Whitehead, a British engineer, designed the first self-propelled torpedo over a hundred years ago. Torpedoes strike their target below water. When a shell or bomb explodes above …

The invention was the parachute which was invented by the French scientist, Louis Lenormand, in 1783. His first jump was an experimental descent from a tree-top, suspended beneath two parasols. (The parasol is so-named because it gives protection against the sun, and the parachute gives protection against the sun, and the parachute gives protection against a chute or fall.) The …

Most boats cannot travel very fast because they have to force their hulls through the water. Hydrofoils, which can carry people at speeds of 80 km/h (50 mph) an hour or more, overcome this problem. At rest, a hydrofoil looks much like any other boat. But beneath the hull are winglike foils, which rise as the hydrofoil begins to move …

If the balls are the same size, and the thrown with equal force on a pavement, then the steel ball will bounce higher. What determines the bounce of a ball is the speed with which it returns to its shape after it has been compressed on impact. This return to shape is what forces the ball up into the air. …

The longest mobile is NEED, a concept phone created by designer Tamer Koseli, which is about 14 cm long and is narrow in width. Koseli bucked the current trend in mobile phones which come with features like a camera and MP3 players. He wanted to create a phone pared of these so-called superfluous features. Need has an OLED display which …