Britannica Magazine April 2023

CONTENTS

A wild and wonderful world awaits you inside!

4 FACTOPIA! Follow the trail of hilarious illustrations and crazily connected facts. All the way from a world record for guzzling hot dogs to… how slugs can communicate with each other using their slimy trails!

6 SNAP IT!

Eye-popping photos to amuse and amaze. Including a spectacular view of the sky at night, the Hindu festival of Holi,

and a house in Russia that is completely upside down. Plus, can you spot the sneaky elephant playing hide-and-seek?

1O EUREKA!

Fascinating inventions and discoveries. Explore a secret chamber found within the Great Pyramid of Giza, see a pioneering 3D-printed space rocket and find out about the AI computer program designed to read people’s minds.

Page 4O

Page 12

Plus, the mystery of

12 COVER FEATURE: CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?! The Earth is flat! California is an island! Aliens live on the Moon! Discover some of the strange and extraordinary things that

21 NOBODY KNOWS

One of the universe’s great unsolved mysteries.

22 COLOUR IT IN! To celebrate Shakespeare Day on April 23rd, use your colouring pens and pencils to bring this special illustration of characters from Shakespeare’s plays to life. Plus, send us your finished drawing and you could win a Shakespeare Timeline Wallbook!

24 THE BIG BRITANNICA FAMILY QUIZ Stretch your brain power with a special

Page 4

This month, we travel back in time to the age of the dinosaurs…

34 JUMBO PUZZLES & GAMES

A four-page special featuring an interstellar Word Search, Spot the Difference, Number Triangles, Sudoku, Word Wheel and Connect the Planets. Plus, try out our tricky new number puzzle Futoshiki!

38

DO IT YOURSELF

Discover how the ancient Romans made mosaics. Then have a go at creating your own!

4O SEND IT IN!

A high-ranking penguin stars in the illustrated fact of the month. Plus, the latest drawings, letters and photos sent in by readers.

41 ASK THE EXPERTS

Your chance to test Britannica’s brilliant experts. This month: find out whether you (or Usain Bolt) could outrun a Tyrannosaurus rex!

43 JOKES & RIDDLES

Hand-picked by our jokes editor May!

four-page edition of our brilliantly tricky quiz. This month’s picture round is: national flags!

28 LISTIFIED! Find out about six fearsome medieval machines designed to attack a castle. Plus, meet ten of the tiniest machines ever made!

3O ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING! Our epic serialisation of the true history of the universe continues.

t b

ever recorded lasted just over 1 minute and 13 seconds longes

Follow the trail of crazily connected facts all the way from a world record for guzzling hot dogs to… how slugs communicate using their slimy trails!

By Kate Hale, Paige Towler and Julie Beer

Illustrations by Andy Smith

foodorliquid they have in theirstomach knownasa ‘wetburp’: a mixture ofairandwhatever

by pushing off the ground with his paw, which is how he cruised around parks and even New York City’s Times Square

ride a skateboard

One man set a world record by devouring 73 hot dogs in just 1O minutes – that’s equal to eating one hot dog every eight seconds 4

r p

If your burps smell like rotten eggs, it’s because the air inside your stomach has mixed with hydrogen sulphide, a gas produced by bacteria in the large intestine

A woman from Ohio, USA, holds a world record for foot-sniffing. She sniffed about 5,6OO feet while testing foot products.

Dogs have harmless bacteria on their feet that make them smell like corn chips

Stomach

Large intestine

A GALAXY OF STARS

This spectacular photo features an arc of stars from our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The colours along the horizon are created by reactions in Earth’s upper atmosphere known as ‘airglow’.

Astonishing photos from around the world

OOOH!

HIDE-AND-SEEK

A large African animal is hiding (not very well) behind this bush in Marakele National Park in Limpopo, South Africa. Can you guess what type of animal it is? The long trunk is probably a good clue… WORLD

HOUSE OF FUN

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to live in a parallel universe where everything is upside down? This wacky house in the city of Krasnoyarsk in Russia gives visitors just that experience. As you can see, even the furniture inside is upside down!

FACE PAINT

Each year, the Hindu festival of Holi marks the end of winter and the arrival of new life in the spring. Holi is a very fun and colourful festival, which involves lots of dancing, singing and the throwing of powdered paint. These paint-spattered children live in a village in Rajasthan, India.

A BUG’S LIFE

Leafcutter bees nest in soft, rotted wood or inside the stems of plants. They cut up plant leaves and use the fragments to form nest cells. This Willughby’s leafcutter bee was photographed in a garden in Staffordshire, England.

BRITISH WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS 2O23, RUNNER-UP, ED PHILLIPS

Eureka!

Why do cats love hiding in boxes?

Do you have a cat? If you do, have you noticed whether it likes to sit inside boxes?

Most cats do, and it’s not just domestic cats: big cats such as tigers do it too. Scientists think this could be because the gentle pressure the cardboard box exerts on the cat’s sides feels similar to the feeling of cuddling up to other kittens when the cat was young. Alternatively, it could be because cats are ‘ambush predators’ that like to hide and then sneak up on things unawares. Experts in cat behaviour at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Austria are continuing to investigate the phenomenon!

The AI computer program that reads people’s minds

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a branch of computer science that involves teaching computers to think and learn in a way that a human might. For example, when you type a text message on a phone, an AI program will offer an autopredict function that suggests the word that the program thinks you are about to type next. It makes this prediction based on all the information it has previously been given about what words mean and how sentences are constructed.

HOW A COMPUTER TURNS THOUGHTS INTO PICTURES

People were given these images to look at and think about:

An AI program created these images based on their brain activity:

This is pretty smart, but a new AI program developed by researchers at Osaka University

in Japan does something even more amazing: it creates pictures of what people are

thinking about just by studying the activity in their brains! In the experiment, people were asked to look at and think about an image of an object, such as a teddy bear or clock, while undergoing a brain scan. By analysing the results of the scan to see which parts of the person’s brain were most active, the AI constructed its own versions of the images they were thinking about. As you can see from the examples above, the AI program was able to do this remarkably well!

The latest astonishing discoveries, inventions and scientific breakthroughs.

Revealed: a new secret chamber inside the Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt is one of the wonders of the world. It is 146 metres high – which is three times taller than the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy – and was built on the plain of Giza by the pharaoh Khufu, who reigned from around 2609 BCE to 2584 BCE. An estimated 2.3 million stone blocks were used to build the pyramid and it remained the tallest human-made structure on Earth for more than 3,000 years.

Several of the chambers that you can see in the illustration above – including the King’s Chamber, Queen’s Chamber

The first 3D-printed space rocket!

3D printing is an ingenious modern technology that enables machines to print three-dimensional physical objects, layer by layer, from digital designs. Lots of useful products are already made using 3D printers, from tools and furniture to jewellery and toys. But the Terran 1 is preparing to become the first 3D-printed rocket to launch into space. Its makers hope that 3D-printing will make space travel cheaper and more efficient in the future.

The Terran 1 will not carry any cargo or crew on its first mission. The test flight has been given the nickname GLHF, which stands for ‘Good Luck, Have Fun’.

and Grand Gallery – have already been discovered and explored by archaeologists.

Now, researchers have used a tiny, flexible camera called

LARGE VOID

Archaeologists think the builders of the pyramid created this large empty space to shift weight away from the Grand Gallery below.

HIDDEN CORRIDOR

an endoscope to film inside a previously hidden corridor within the pyramid without damaging it. They think the corridor was built to shift the pyramid’s weight away from the main entrance or another as yet undiscovered chamber. Archaeologists also

Researchers used a tiny flexible camera to explore this hidden corridor. They were the first people to see inside it for thousands of years.

think that a larger void or empty space higher up the pyramid was created for the same reason – to shift weight away from the Grand Gallery below. Pyramid builders often left large gaps between the stone blocks inside a pyramid to give its internal structure greater strength and stability.

Could the dodo make a comeback?

The dodo was a large, flightless bird that once lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. However, thanks to the arrival of humans, who hunted and ate dodos, and the animals they brought with them, such as pigs and monkeys, who ate dodos’ eggs and competed with them for food, the last dodo died in 1681 and the species became extinct.

Now a genetic research company is attempting to adapt the DNA, or genetic code, of pigeons, one of the dodo’s closest genetic relatives, to create a new type of flightless bird. The bird wouldn’t be exactly the same as a dodo but it could share some of the dodo’s main characteristics.

Grand Gallery

Access shafts

Queen’s Chamber

King’s Chamber

By Lisa Thomas

Illustrations by Andy Smith

The fireproof salamander Salamanders are brightly coloured amphibians that look a bit like a lizard crossed with a frog. They are nocturnal animals which are found in many parts of the world and are especially common in North America. The name salamander comes from an old Persian word meaning ‘fire within’ and is connected to a strange and ancient belief: that salamanders are fireproof, and able to both start a fire and put one out. In fact, during the 1st century CE, a Roman writer and naturalist named Pliny the Elder is said to have thrown a salamander into a fire to test if the stories of salamanders’ magical, fireresistant powers were true. Unfortunately they aren’t, and the poor salamander did not survive the experiment.

People used to think that salamanders were born in fire.

Farts in a jar

People believed in lots of bizarre medical treatments during the Middle Ages. But perhaps the weirdest of them all involved the storing of stinky farts in a jar. The reason people did

Throughout history, people have believed some strange and extraordinary things about the world which we now know to be untrue. Here we celebrate a selection of the most fascinating (and funny!) examples.

carried in the air. (In fact, as we now know, the plague was caused by a bacterium which was passed between animals and humans by infected fleas.) Medieval doctors believed that a patient could combat the miasma by breathing in something equally disgusting and reduce their chances of catching the plague or make their symptoms less serious. In order to follow this pointless advice, some people kept a goat in their homes that would

give off a suitably smelly and therefore protective pong. Others would fart in a jar and quickly seal it afterwards. Then, when they suspected that they had breathed in a plague-carrying vapour, they opened the jar and took a deep breath of the farty air inside.

Phrenology

The practice of phrenology grew from the idea that the human brain was made from muscles which grew bigger the more they were used, as muscles do in other parts of the body. As a result, phrenologists claimed, bumps would then appear in different areas of the skull. And so by feeling the surface of someone’s head, phrenologists could then perform ‘skull readings’ that would supposedly reveal insights into the person’s character. Phrenology is now known to have no basis in science but it was once widely followed.

Phrenology maps showing

Continued on next page

Phrenology involved studying the shape of people’s heads.

different areas of the skull were created to demonstrate which parts of the brain related to which aspects of someone’s personality. Unfortunately for the phrenologists, however, every part of the theory of phrenology was incorrect.

Beware the bonnacon

According to the medieval stories and myths written about it, the bonnacon was a strange-looking beast with a head like a bull’s and horns that curled inwards towards each other. The bonnacon’s curved horns weren’t very useful for defending it from hunters. But it did have a strangely revolting weapon up its sleeve: it could fire a stream of acidic poo out of its bottom that could cover an area larger than several football pitches and burn everything in its path. Judging by the way the bonnacon is usually drawn with a mischievous grin in

medieval manuscripts, people probably thought its explosive pooing ability was a funny joke. Thankfully, the bonnacon does not exist.

The centre of the universe

Everyone likes to think they’re special, and for thousands of years humans can be forgiven for believing that their home, the Earth, lay at the centre of the universe. It was only in 1543 that a Polish astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus questioned this widely held belief by proposing that the Sun was near the centre of the universe, with the other planets, including Earth, revolving around it. Copernicus’s ‘heliocentric model’, as it became known, wasn’t completely correct either – the Sun is only the centre of our solar system –but it was a giant step in the right direction. (Modern space scientists think that, for reasons too mind-bendingly complex to explain here, the universe doesn’t actually have a centre at all!)

Medicinal mice

In ancient Egypt, people sometimes placed a dead mouse in their mouth in the mistaken belief that it would cure toothache. In some cases, a mashed-up mouse was blended with other ingredients and applied as a paste to the most painful spot. People in Elizabethan England also used mice as a medical treatment but for completely different reasons. They believed that one way to remove a wart, which is a hard growth on the skin, was to cut a dead mouse in half and place one half on top of the wart. It didn’t work.

The island of California Today, California is a state running along the west coast of the United States. But

Kings and queens could cure the sick

Starting in the 10th and 11th centuries CE, many people in England and France believed that their king or queen could cure people suffering from certain diseases and ailments just by touching them. Charles II of England, for example, who reigned between 1660 and 1685, once touched 7,000 people carrying the disease scrofula in a single year in the vain hope that it would make them better. Belief in the healing power of the ‘royal touch’, as it was known, only died out completely during the 18th century.

 Continued from previous page

Right: a map made in 1699 showing California as an island off the west coast of North America.

for hundreds of years, many Europeans were convinced that it was, in fact, an island. At first, during the 16th century, this was understandable because the region was difficult to explore. But even after Spanish navigators realised that the northern end of the Gulf of California was connected to the mainland – proving that California and the Baja region to the south was a peninsula and not an island – the mistake persisted for more than 200 years.

In fact, a mention of the uncertain nature of ‘Callifornia’ appeared in the first edition of

Encyclopaedia Britannica (which is the parent publication of this magazine) in 1768.

Sleeping with a skull

Do you grind your teeth while you’re asleep? Lots of people do and it can cause damage to teeth and gums. Modern dentists sometimes

recommend wearing a rubber gumshield to stop the grinding, but ancient Babylonians had a much more imaginative solution: sleeping next to a human skull. The Babylonians believed that most illnesses were caused by evil spirits. Teeth grinding, for example, was thought to be caused by a spirit trying to contact someone while they slept. Sleeping next to a skull and, even better, kissing or licking the skull several times during the night, was therefore believed

Follow that goose!

The First Crusade, which began in 1095 CE, was a military campaign in which tens of thousands of Christians from Europe travelled to Jerusalem in the Middle East in order to recapture the city and surrounding Holy Lands from Muslim control. The first group to set off was a rabble of peasants, townsfolk and knights which became known as the People’s Army. Several chronicles mention a group within the People’s Army that decided to follow a ‘holy goose’ which they believed had been ‘inspired by God’ to lead the way. According to the story, the holy goose only got as far as northern France before it died of exhaustion, leaving the crusaders to find the way to Jerusalem on their own.

 Continued from previous page

to be the best way to get rid of the unhelpful spirit. Eugh!

The power of onions

Both ancient Greek athletes training to compete in the Olympic Games and Roman gladiators preparing to do battle in the Colosseum believed in the awesome power of an unlikely vegetable: the onion. The Greeks thought that eating onions would make them stronger by ‘lightening the balance of the blood’, while gladiators used to rub their bodies down with onions to firm up their muscles. As far as we know, it didn’t help.

Dangerous trains

Before the invention of the railway in the 19th century, which disproved the theory, many people believed that human beings would die of suffocation if they travelled faster than 30 miles per hour. Why? Because the surrounding air would rush past them so quickly they wouldn’t have time to breathe it in.

Years later, as America’s first railways expanded across the country, some people worried that the constant side-to-side motion of the moving trains would ‘injure the brain’, shattering the nerves of travellers and perhaps even driving them mad. Anyone who has been on a high-speed modern train will confirm that neither of those things is true.

The Earth is flat

Many ancient cultures around the world believed that the Earth was flat. Ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Norse and Germanic peoples, for example, thought the world was a flat disc floating in the ocean. While in ancient China, people believed the Earth was a flat square. One of the first

future.

people to propose the idea that the Earth was a sphere (which we now know to be correct) was the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who lived in the 6th century BCE. Centuries later it was often said that the Spanish adventurer Christopher Columbus, who had sailed across the Atlantic in 1492, had astonished people of his time by proving that the world was round. However, this was a popular myth, because most educated people in Europe at that time already knew the Earth was spherical. Nonetheless, Columbus was confused about where he was going: when he landed on the island of Cuba in the Caribbean he initially thought he had reached Japan.

The gemstone that could predict your future

Emeralds are beautiful and expensive gemstones that are often used in jewellery. During medieval times, many people also believed that they possessed magical powers.

Continued on next page 

Below: emeralds were thought to be able to help people see into the

 Continued from previous page

All you had to do was place an emerald underneath your tongue (while being careful not to swallow it!) and you’d be able to see what was going to happen to you in the future. Another popular but mistaken belief was that if an emerald changed colour, it could reveal whether someone was lying to you or telling the truth.

Eye beams

The Greek philosopher Plato believed that when people see, their eyes generate invisible beams that carry information from the objects the beams touch back to the eyes. When two people look at each other, Plato thought that their ‘eye beams’ twisted together. Although it was completely

illness and disease. Although blood-letting has since been proven to have almost no medical benefits, it has long been a part of traditional and alternative medicines in many parts of the world, including in Europe, India and China.

Turning poo into gold

During the Middle Ages, there was a kind of primitive forerunner to modern science called alchemy. One of the alchemists’ major ambitions was to turn cheap,

Tongue maps

Tongue maps, like the one below, divide the tongue into sections based on the type of taste receptors that are supposedly located there. Unfortunately, tongue maps are also completely misleading and wrong! The taste receptors that pick up the five basic tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami) are found in all parts of the tongue.

wrong, this was also a rather charming idea!

Blood-sucking leeches

A leech, in case you have yet to meet one, is a carnivorous type of worm that attaches itself to the bodies of animals or humans in order to suck their blood. It may surprise you to learn that for more than 2,000 years, many doctors deliberately stuck leeches onto people as a treatment. In some cases, a single patient could be covered in more than 100 leeches! Why? It was all connected to an ancient and widespread belief in bloodletting, which was based on the idea that taking blood from a patient could prevent or cure

easily available substances into gold. One ‘recipe’ for gold included a lump of horse poo mixed together with 200 rotten chicken eggs and vinegar!

Although, like all the methods attempted by medieval alchemists, it didn’t work. Modern physicists are now able to create gold from other elements by smashing their atoms together at very high speeds. However, the amount of gold this creates is so tiny that the cost of doing it is more expensive than the gold the process creates.

The wisdom of chickens

The armies of ancient Rome were victorious in many

battles and, at the time, lots of soldiers believed this was partly thanks to the humble chicken. Chickens were brought along with Roman armies wherever they went because the chickens’ behaviour immediately before a battle was thought to predict its outcome. If the chickens gobbled up their food, it meant a Roman victory was likely. If the chickens refused to eat, then defeat was on the cards. According to the statesman Cicero, when a particular group of chickens refused to eat before a sea

Right: the Romans thought chickens could help predict the outcome of battles.

The Y2K bug

The Y2K or millennium bug wasn’t a pesky insect but rather a computer bug, or flaw, that people believed could cause global chaos on January 1st 2000, the first day of the new millennium. The reason for this was that computer systems built before 1990 often used a two-digit code for the year, with the 19 at the start left out. What would happen, people

worried, when the year 1999 turned into 2000 and these old-fashioned computer programs registered the year as 00? Would all kinds of vital technologies, from digital banking to airline flight safety systems, all stop working at once? Thankfully, after a lot of time and millions of pounds were spent preparing for it, the Y2K bug caused very little disruption. Phew!

battle in 249 BCE, an angry official threw them overboard. It was probably just a coincidence but the Romans lost the sea battle, too.

The dinosaur with two brains

The belief that some dinosaurs, and Stegosaurus in particular, had an extra brain in their bottoms started in the 1870s. It can be traced back to Othniel Charles Marsh, a famous fossil hunter who thought that an enlarged cavity or space near a Stegosaurus’s hips was evidence that it

had a second brain connecting its back and front legs.

Marsh’s logic was that the brain in a Stegosaurus’s head was so tiny it must need some additional brainpower to control the whole of its body. If Marsh had been lucky enough to have a second brain in his bottom, he might have worked out that his two-brain theory was nonsense. However, even today, palaeontologists still aren’t sure what this

Continued on next page 

mysterious cavity between a Stegosaurus’s hips was for.

The rings of Mars

Did you know that four planets in our solar system – Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune – all have rings? (Saturn’s are the biggest and brightest which is why they are the bestknown.) In astronomy’s early days, some stargazers

Aliens live on the Moon

In the 1820s, an astronomer from Germany named Franz von Paula Gruithuisen said he had seen roads and cities on the Moon through his telescope. He called the aliens that lived there ‘lunarians’ and claimed they had built roads, buildings and even forts on its surface. Another 19th-century astronomer, William Herschel from England, also believed aliens lived on the Moon and would give regular updates about their construction projects. Both astronomers were wrong but Gruithuisen does now have a crater on the Moon named after him.

The Moon is a hollow spacecraft

In the 1970s, two Russian scientists took the idea that aliens were living on the Moon one stage further by proposing that the Moon was in fact a giant shell-like spacecraft that was hollow inside and controlled by intelligent aliens.

Physicists, however, have calculated

that the strength of the Moon’s gravitational pull means that it must be solid in the middle.

Humans never landed on the Moon

Perhaps even more strangely, given all the evidence to the contrary, some people still believe that the 1969 Moon landings, in which astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the Moon, never happened. Instead, they believe the photos and video footage of the famous Moon landings were all faked as part of an elaborate hoax.

people still believe the 1969 Moon landing never happened and the photos of it are fake.

thought Mars had rings around it too. But although it is orbited by two moons, Phobos and Deimos, Mars has never had rings during the time humans have existed on Earth. However, astronomers think that Mars could have had rings billions of years ago. What’s more, it is likely to develop new rings around 70 million years from now. So watch this space! :

Some

Strange things that people believed about the Moon

COLOUR IT IN!

Day on April 23rd, why not bring this picture to life by colouring in the characters from the famous 17th-century writer’s plays? When you’ve finished, send a photo or scan of your drawing to editor@britannicamagazine.com and you could be a lucky winner of a gigantic Shakespeare Timeline Wallbook!

To celebrate William Shakespeare

WilliamShakespeare

The

ANIMALS

1 What type of marine animal is an orca?

a. A shark

b. A whale

c. A dolphin

d. A porpoise

2 Which of these farm animals is there the largest number of on Earth?

a. Pigs

b. Cows

c. Sheep

d. Chickens

3 What does the Latin species name Tyrannosaurus rex mean in English?

a. King of the jungle

b. King of the tyrant lizards

c. King of the dinosaurs

d. Terrifying teeth

BIG Britannica

Test your family’s brainpower by playing this special four-page edition of the Big Britannica Quiz! Regular readers of Britannica Magazine may have an advantage because some of the facts appeared in previous issues of the magazine. Don’t worry if you don’t know them all, though – the answers are at the end of the quiz. Good luck!

4 What is a giant panda’s main source of food?

a. Bamboo

b. Bark

c. Fruits and berries

d. Insects

5 What is a collective name for a group of camels?

a. A hump

b. A troop

c. An oasis

d. A caravan

6 Up to how many times a second can a bee beat its wings?

a. 10

b. 90

c. 190

d. 900

SPACE & NATURE

7 What is the second largest planet in the solar system?

a. Jupiter

b. Uranus

5

c. Venus

d. Saturn

8 What is the innermost colour of a rainbow?

a. Indigo

b. Violet

c. Red

d. Orange

9 Angel Falls is the world’s highest waterfall. Which country is it in?

a. Colombia

b. Brazil

c. Zambia

d. Venezuela

1O Which is the nearest galaxy to our own galaxy, the Milky Way?

a. Cartwheel Galaxy, pictured

b. Andromeda Galaxy

c. Antennae Galaxy

d. Sunflower Galaxy

11 What is the Enhanced Fujita Scale used to measure?

a. Hurricanes

b. Earthquakes

c. Lightning

d. Tornados

15 Approximately what percentage of a child’s body is made from water?

a. 15%

b. 35%

c. 65%

d. 95%

Family Quiz

12

On the surface of which planet is the largest mountain in the solar system found?

a. Mars

b. Neptune

c. Mercury

d. Earth

HUMAN BODY

16

13

Of all the naturally occurring human hair colours, which is the rarest?

a. Blonde

b. Brown

c. Black

d. Red

14

The humerus bone, which is found in your arm, is sometimes known by another name. What is it?

a. Elbow

b. Wrist

c. Funny bone

d. Silly bone

16 Which of these organs of the body filters the blood to remove unwanted waste and toxic substances?

a. Kidney

b. Heart

c. Lung

d. Stomach

 Continued from previous page

17

If all the hair on a human head was gathered together to form a rope, approximately how many cows could it support the weight of?

a. 1

b. 8

c. 12

d. 18

18

What is ephebiphobia a fear of?

a. Spiders

b. Socks

c. Teenagers

d. Television

HUMAN WORLD

19

In which year was the first handheld mobile phone invented?

a. 1963

b. 1973

c. 1983

d. 1993

2O

What is the name for the giant stones that form an ancient circular structure on Salisbury Plane in the UK, pictured far right?

a. Avebury

b. The Rollright Stones

c. The Callanish Stones

d. Stonehenge

21 Adventurer Amelia Earhart, pictured right, was the first woman to achieve what?

a. Swim across the English Channel

b. Fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean

c. Sail all around the world

d. Travel into outer space

22

Gravity was discovered by the scientist Isaac Newton with the help of which fruit?

a. Apple

b. Orange

c. Banana

d. Pineapple

23

Which of the following characters was not created by children’s author Roald Dahl?

a. Miss Trunchbull

b. The Enormous Crocodile

c. Mr Stink

d. Violet Beauregarde, pictured left

24

What is the official language of Brazil?

a. Spanish

b. Brazilian

c. French

d. Portuguese

21

GEOGRAPHY

25

What is the capital city of Australia?

a. Sydney

b. Canberra

c. Melbourne

d. Adelaide

b. 19 times

c. 29 times

d. 39 times

27

Which country has the most islands?

a. Sweden

b. Norway

c. Canada

26

How many times could the United Kingdom fit inside China?

a. 9 times

d. Indonesia

28

Which is the only major river to pass

across the Equator twice? a. Nile b. Amazon

c. Congo

Yangtze 29Which European city is sometimes known as the ‘Eternal City’? a. London b. Paris c. Venice d. Rome

3O

Which 10 countries are these the national flags of?

there are more than 20 billion chickens on Earth,

LISTIFIED!

SIEGE ENGINES

Six fearsome machines that were once used to attack a castle

In the Middle Ages (500–1500 C.E.), invading armies could completely surround a castle, so no one could get in or out. This was called a siege. Some sieges lasted weeks, months or even years.* Armies built an array of extraordinary machines to attack castles from outside the walls. Here are a few of them:

1Siege towers rolled up alongside a castle so the invading soldiers could climb over the top of the castle walls. So large was one siege tower used for an attack on the Mediterranean island of Rhodes by an army from Macedonia that it required more than 3,000 soldiers to move it up against the city walls!

2Trebuchets launched large missiles, including massive stones and buckets of burning oil, at or into the castle.** The design of a trebuchet, which is pictured on the left, allowed it to launch heavier objects than a traditional catapult and also hurl it longer distances. This enabled the soldiers using it to do more damage to the castle they were besieging, while also staying far enough away to avoid being struck by arrows and other long-range weapons fired by the soldiers who were defending the castle.

3Ballistas look like very large crossbows and fired arrows, as well as other deadly missiles, that would have been too heavy for any human to shoot from a handheld bow. The ballista was among the first artillery weapons. It’s thought to have been invented by the ancient Greeks around 600 years ago. It was also used by the Romans.

Soldiers used siege engines to climb over a castle’s walls.

Trebuchet

Prepare to be amazed (and amused!) by the unusual facts crammed into these irresistible lists.

4 Catapults were one of the most important weapons of war before the invention of guns and cannons. Catapults were designed in several different ways to achieve the same objective: throw rocks and other small objects to break down the castle walls. They were used to both attack and defend castles and were often built with wheels to make them more mobile.

5 Battering rams built from tree trunks smashed open the castle gates. Soldiers used their weight and strength to push them forwards. The rams were often suspended from wooden roofs which also served to protect the soldiers beneath as they charged forward. The tree trunks used to ram the gates often had a metal head to cause more damage. Some metal heads were carved into the shape of a ram, or male sheep.

Micro Machines

Ten of the smallest machines ever made

1 Smallest abacus –O.OOOOO1 nanometre*

A team of scientists built a counting machine using ten molecules of the element carbon that can be moved along a tiny groove on a copper surface like the beads of an abacus.

7 Smallest electric drill –6.7 millimetres

This scaled-down electric drill is powered by a small 3-volt battery. Its rotating metal head, or drill bit, can make O.5 millimetre-wide holes in foam and soft wood.

6 Springalds could fire three deadly metal arrows called bolts as far as 160 metres in a single shot. Leonardo da Vinci once drew a design for a springald.

*The longest recorded siege in history was of the city of Candia (now called Heraklion) on the Mediterranean island of Crete. It was attacked by armies of the Ottoman Empire in 1648. The defending army held out for 21 years and 149 days before finally surrendering. Candia was a port city, so was able to receive supplies from ally boats.

**The largest known trebuchet was called the Warwolf. It could hurl 140 kilogram rocks as far as 200 metres. It took 50 people three months to build!

Listified! by Andrew Pettie and illustrated by Andrés Lozano is out now.

Ballistas fired large arrows and were used to both attack and defend medieval castles.

2Smallest engine –O.1 nanometre

Made from a single calcium ion (which is an atom with an electrical charge, and in this case a positive charge), the world’s smallest engine converts heat from laser beams into physical movement, which has been used to turn a tiny wheel. It’s around 1O billion times smaller than a car engine.

3 Smallest ‘car’ –4 nanometres

Mostly built from carbon atoms, this molecular ‘car’ is so small that you would need a powerful microscope to see it. Created by scientists as an experiment, it’s slightly wider than a strand of human DNA.

4 Smallest robot –12O nanometres

Tiny machines called nanorobots can be sent inside the human body to repair damaged cells and perform other medical tasks.**

5 Smallest watch –3.4 millimetres

Despite only being 3.4 millimetres wide, 1.4 millimetres thick and weighing less than a gram, the smallest mechanical watch has 98 individual parts.

6 Smallest fidget spinner – 5.1 millimetres

The world’s smallest metal fidget spinner could easily sit (and spin) on the tip of a sewing needle.

8Smallest telephone –47.5 millimetres

The smallest telephone that you can still use to make a phone call is 47.5 millimetres tall, 1O millimetres wide and 21 millimetres thick.

9Smallest motorcycle –8O millimetres

Tom Wiberg from Sweden built the smallest motorcycle to be ridden by a human. The seat is 65 millimetres off the ground.***

1OSmallest unicycle –28O millimetres

The smallest rideable unicycle is roughly the height of a school ruler. Its wheel has a diameter of just 12.7 millimetres.

*A nanometre is one millionth of a millimetre.

**Doctors control the nanorobots from outside the body using magnets.

***To prove it worked, Wiberg rode his miniature motorcycle, which he named Smalltoe, for a distance of 1O metres. It has a top speed of 2 kilometres per hour.

Absolutely Everything!

Each month we feature an amazing story from world history taken from the bestselling book by Christopher Lloyd, with illustrations by Andy Forshaw. This month: the dinosaurs!

Pisanosaurus

227–221 million years ago South America

Lystrosaurus

25O million years ago

Asia, Africa, Antarctica

Nyasasaurus

245–24O million years ago Africa

Eoraptor

228 million years ago South America

Very few reptiles survived the terrible Permian Mass Extinction, which occurred 266 million to 251 million years ago and may have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions. It led to the extinction of about 95 per cent of marine species and about 70 per cent of land species. Thankfully, one of the reptiles that did survive was Lystrosaurus, which was an important species for humans.

Lystrosaurus is a link between reptiles and mammals. If it hadn’t survived, some experts think mammals may

never have evolved at all. Humans are mammals. So we must be thankful that this possible distant ancestor of ours made it, even if it did look like a cross between a lizard and a pig. Then, out of disaster came a completely new generation of reptiles. These were the most fearsome creatures ever to tread the Earth. Welcome to the age of the dinosaurs!

Fossils of about 800 types of dinosaur have been found so far,

although nearly 2,000 are thought to have existed altogether. Some walked on two feet, some on four. Some ate plants, some ate animals, some ate both.

Among the first known dinosaurs were the prosauropods. These were plant eaters that could grow up to ten metres long, with small heads and long necks. They usually walked on all fours, but sometimes climbed

Right: amateur fossil hunters Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell. Left: fossilised Iguanodon teeth found by the Mantells.

Plateosaurus

21O million years ago Europe

At the beginning of the Triassic Period, Lystrosaurus was the most common animal on land. But by the middle of the period, dinosaurs had burst on to the scene. This picture shows Lystrosaurus and some Triassic dinosaurs along with the dates when they lived and where their fossils were found. Because they lived at different times and in different places, they would never have appeared together like this.

Coelophysis

225–22O million years ago North America

on to two legs when reaching to nibble at the top of a tree.

Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell were amateur fossil hunters who lived in Lewes, England. In 1822, the Mantells found several very large fossilised teeth in a forest near their home. They worked out that these teeth belonged to an animal about eighteen metres long. That’s nearly as long as two double-decker buses!

After years of argument, scientists agreed about the Mantells’ teeth. They decided

they belonged to a new type of creature that had never been known before. They called it the Iguanodon because they thought it would have looked something like a much larger version of a modern iguana. Later fossils showed it didn’t look quite like that and wasn’t much more than half as big as they thought, either.

The Mantells’ discovery made people realise for the first time that the Earth was once home to huge, nowextinct monsters. They were

Continued on next page 

named dinosaurs, which means ‘terrible lizards’. Dinosaurs lived from about 245 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. They spanned three great geological periods called the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.

Some of the biggest dinosaurs were the sauropods, and one of the biggest of them was Argentinosaurus. This huge, heavy beast walked on all four legs. It could grow up to thirty metres long. And it may have weighed up to seventy tonnes, probably making it the heaviest animal ever on Earth. Its survival strategy was simple. It grew so large that few other creatures were big enough or strong enough to kill it. Other dinosaurs were fast. Ornithomimus may have been the speediest dinosaur of all. Its name means ‘bird-like’ because Othniel Charles Marsh, the palaeontologist who named it, noticed how much its claws looked like a bird’s. And that was in 1890. He didn’t have any idea that over 100 years later other

palaeontologists would find fossils that show Ornithomimus also had feathers.

Still other dinosaurs had unusual built-in tools. Iguanodon was one of those. Its thumb was shaped like a terrifying dagger. Perhaps it used its thumb to defend itself, standing upright on its hind legs to fend off attackers. But some scientists think Iguanodon would just have run from predators and used its thumb spike for spearing food.

Of course the dinosaur with the strongest bite is the most famous dinosaur of all, the Tyrannosaurus rex, or T. rex for short. It lived in what is now western North America. T. rex walked on two legs and had a massive skull, balanced by a long, heavy tail. Each of its hands had just two fingers, and its upper arms were quite short compared with its massive legs and tail. At around twelve metres long and weighing more than a modern elephant, this was one big carnivore. It dined on dead carcasses or live prey – possibly both.

Palaeontologists have found T. rex dung with crushed bones in it. Bones have nutritious marrow inside them, so we know this giant predator used its powerful jaws and teeth to get every last bit of food from animals it killed itself or leftovers from other predators.

THEROPODS AND BIRDS

DATE NAME

228 million years ago

Eoraptor

The most complete T. rex skeleton was found by fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson in

No one knows exactly how birds evolved from dinosaurs. But here are some examples of species and their characteristics that hint at the way today’s birds emerged.

22O million years ago

12O million years ago

Oviraptor Chicken

Archaeopteryx was an early ancestor of modern birds.

Coelophysis 32

 Continued from previous page

Could aoutrunyouTurnT.rex?

to page 41 to find out!

CHARACTERISTICS

Eoraptor had five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Birds today have three fingers in each of their wings.

Coelophysis had a wishbone. Modern birds have a wishbone too, made up of two collarbones stuck together in a forked shape.

Oviraptor was discovered alongside some fossilised eggs, and it had feathers. Experts think it was probably brooding over its own eggs like a chicken.

Chickens can fly! They also have feathers, talons, a beak and a wishbone. Today they are farmed worldwide to provide meat and eggs for humans.

Quetzalcoatlus was a giant flying reptile. When standing on the ground, it was taller than a giraffe!

Sue the T. rex is one of the largest and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex fossils ever found.

and a wishbone. Von Meyer’s fossil dated back some 150 million years, which means it lived at about the same time as the long-necked prosauropods were munching the tops of trees.

For years experts were baffled as to which creatures birds were descended from. How had they learned to fly? Where did their feathers come from? Knowing about just one prehistoric bird wasn’t enough to understand what happened.

Another bird-like dinosaur with feathers on the back of its head, body and arms was the Sinornithosaurus millenii. This fossil, found in China, dates to about 125 million years ago.

August 1990. This famous fossil was named Sue after its discoverer. Sue is 12.3 metres long from nose to tail.

Not all dinosaurs were big or fast or strong. One of the smallest, Microraptor, was a four-winged dinosaur the size of a crow. It couldn’t fly but probably glided from tree to tree looking for food.

In 1861, Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer, a German fossil hunter, announced the discovery of what he claimed was the first-ever bird. He called it Archaeopteryx. It was about the same size as a modern magpie, and was definitely bird-like.

Its feathers were arranged in much the same way as a modern bird’s. It even had bird-like claws on its legs,

Then, in 1996, Chinese scientists announced that fossil hunter Li Yumin had found a fossil that showed some dinosaurs had feathers. Sinosauropteryx caused a sensation. This was a 1.5-metre-long, two-legged creature with the jaws and flattened teeth of meat-eating dinosaurs. It had clawed fingers, and its legs showed it must have been a fast runner.

The puzzle of where birds came from had at last been solved. Feathers first appeared on some dinosaurs. They probably helped keep their bodies warm. Then later, some feathers evolved into the kind that helps birds fly. Many scientists think that all theropods (smart, fast dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and T. rex) had feathers, especially when they were young. So what’s the

difference between birds and dinosaurs? Well, not much. In fact, dinosaurs are alive and well in the world we live in today. But don’t panic. Only the kind that could fly are still alive. We call them birds! While dinosaurs ruled the land, two other types of animals dominated the ocean and skies. Giant sharks, underwater crocodile ancestors and nightmarish long-necked marine reptiles prowled the seas gobbling up squid and fish. And in the skies, flying reptiles called pterosaurs swooped and glided, including giant Quetzalcoatlus, with a wingspan of twelve metres! That’s as wide as a small airplane. :

Stumped? Don’t worry, you can find the answers to all the puzzles on page 42.

SPACE WORD SEARCH

Can you spot the 25 words connected with space hidden in our jumbo word search puzzle? Good luck!

NUMBER TRIANGLES!

In the triangles below, the numbers inside the squares are the sum of the two numbers in the connected circles. For example:

Can you work out which number should appear in each of the circles?

All the numbers in the circles are between 1 and 9 and a number can only be used once in each triangle.

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE!

Can you spot all 2O differences between these two farmyard illustrations?

Use the word wheel to help find the answers to the seven clues below. All the answers contain the middle letter, and each letter can only be used once.

Clue: a plant or part of plant used as food (9 letters).

Answer:

Clue: raise or lift to a higher position (7 letters).

Answer:

Clue: the most common type of insect (6 letters).

Answer:

Clue: to go away from or exit (5 letters).

B V E E E

T A L G

Answer:

Clue: a large bird of prey (5 letters).

Answer:

Clue: a hinged barrier in a wall, fence or hedge (4 letters).

Answer:

Clue: an imaginative story or narrative (4 letters).

Answer:

CHANGING ROOMS

Can you find your way through our maze of square rooms? Enter through the door marked with the red arrow, then try to find your way to the exit by going through the correct sequence of open doors. Good luck!

Picture Quiz Picture Quiz

Fill in the missing numbers so that every row and column includes the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. Use the inequality signs as clues and make sure numbers always obey the inequality sign between them. This means that the arrows between the numbers always point towards the smaller number.

Here is an example:

In the three squares shown above, the number A must be less than 3 and greater than the missing number B. We know all the numbers must be between 1 and 4 , so therefore A must be 2 and B must be 1.

Can you work out what you are looking at in each of these seven photos?

BRIDGE PUZZLE

Draw bridges between the red islands so that the number of bridges connected to each island equals the number written inside the circle.

Rules:

1. The bridges must be straight lines and cannot bend.

2. The bridges cannot intersect with each other.

3. The bridges can be horizontal or vertical but not diagonal.

4. The maximum number of bridges connecting two islands is two.

CONNECT THE PLANETS

Draw a line to connect each pair of planets. You can’t use diagonal lines and the lines can’t cross or touch each other. You must fill the whole grid with lines but only one line is allowed in each square.

SUDOKU!

Fill all the empty squares so that every row, column and 3x2 box contains each of the numbers 1 to 6.

6

Make your own mosaic!

Humans have been creating beautiful mosaics for thousands of years. Discover some of their fascinating history, then follow these simple instructions to design and make your own.

When you arrange small pieces of stone, tile, glass or other material to form a picture or pattern, it is called a mosaic. Mosaics are often used to decorate buildings, but they can also be thought of as beautiful works of art in themselves.

People from different parts of the world have been making mosaics for centuries. You’ve probably seen examples of ancient Greek and Roman mosaics. But did you know that the ancient Mesopotamians, Islamic peoples of the Middle East, Pueblo Indians of North America and Incas of South America all created wonderful mosaics too?

One of the most famous Roman mosaics was found in Pompeii, the city destroyed by

the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. It shows the ancient Greek king Alexander the Great, pictured below, winning a battle against the Persian king Darius. Archaeologists estimate the mosaic contains more than a million pieces!

Would you like to learn the ancient art of mosaic-making? Then follow our step-by-step instructions to create your own!

Below: a section of a mosaic showing Alexander the Great in battle.

A Roman mosaic in Pompeii. The Latin words along the bottom mean ‘Beware of the dog’!

INSTRUCTIONS WHAT YOU NEED

Choose your tiles. You can use 1 cm tiles made from glass or stone, available from craft stores. Alternatively, cut 1 cm square tiles out of coloured paper or foam.

3

Choose the subject you would like your mosaic to picture – perhaps a favourite animal, flower or geometric pattern.

TOP TIP!

For a quicker activity, you can make your mosaic design template a work of art in itself!

squared paper

Using a sheet of squared paper, sketch the outline of your chosen design in pencil, leaving a gap around the edge of the sheet.

craft glue

pencil

card

coloured pencils

felt-tip pens

TILE OPTIONS

stone glass paper foam

5

Pick a pattern for your border. You could use one of the patterns shown here. Your border pattern could run around all four sides. Or it could just run along the top and bottom edges.

TOP TIP!

6

Place your coloured tiles onto a piece of card. Use your design template to work out the correct position and colour of each tile before you place it onto the card. Start from one corner of the mosaic and work outwards.

Try displaying your mosaic on a three-dimensional object, such as a flower pot or empty tin!

Once you are happy, go over the colours again with felt-tip pens. You have now created the design template for your mosaic.

Colour in the squares of your border and central design with pencils. The grid lines on the squared paper won’t always match the outline of your sketch. That’s fine – just colour in the grid squares that give the closest match.

9

Stick your tiles in place with craft glue. Leave to dry. 8

If you used paper for the tiles, you could carefully brush diluted craft glue over the mosaic to seal it.

If you used glass or stone tiles, you could add glue between the tiles to give the mosaic a smoother surface. Congratulations, your Roman mosaic is ready to put on display!

SEND IT IN!

Your photos

Lift-off!

Moon mission

In our March Issue, we invited readers to design and draw their very own lunar vehicles. Here are two of our favourites. As you can see, they both include some impressive on-board gadgets!

Vehicle 1 is by Gregory, age 8

Vehicle 2 is by Benji, age 9

I built this space rocket using old drinks cans and bottles that other people had thrown away. Plastic products are difficult to break down and they can cause lots of problems if they end up in the ocean. By building this rocket, I wanted to turn unwanted waste materials into something useful in order to help protect Earth’s environment.

age 11

Ask the experts

Readers ask. Experts answer. Send your questions to: experts@britannicamagazine.com HOW THE SPRINTING SPEEDS OF A HUMAN AND A T. REX COMPARE

Question: Could a human outrun a T. rex?

From Joel, age 7

Answer

To answer this question, we need to know two things: how fast could a T. rex run, and how fast can a human run. The second of those is easy to calculate. We have lots of information about how fast people can run, because we can observe them doing it.

Usain Bolt is the fastest recorded

human, and he has been measured running at almost 28 miles per hour. Figuring out how fast extinct animals such as a T. rex could move is harder, because we can’t observe them moving. Even though bones don’t move on their own, the fossilised skeletons we have unearthed can tell us how dinosaurs walked and ran. Bones can preserve ‘scars’ where the muscles attached, and this gives us clues as to which muscles went where, and how big they were.

Scientists have used this information to build computer simulations that

can figure out how the dinosaur would have moved, based on where its joints and muscles go. These simulations have calculated that a T. rex might have had a top speed somewhere between 15 and 25 mph. So could a human outrun a

DID YOU KNOW?

When Usain Bolt, left, set a new world record for the 1OO-metre sprint – of 9.58 seconds – his top running speed during the race was measured at 27.8 mph!

T. rex? Yes, Usain Bolt could comfortably outrun a T. rex But, I suspect when you said ‘a human’ you actually meant could ‘an average person’ outrun a T. rex? The average human sprinting speed is 15 mph. So now the answer to the question is even more interesting. Could Usain Bolt outrun a T. rex? Almost certainly. Could you or I? Probably not. So maybe it’s a good job they are extinct, or we could both end up as T. rex food!

DR PETER FALKINGHAM

Palaeontologist

MAGAZINE BRITANNICA

Published by

What on Earth Magazines Ltd, The Black Barn, Wickhurst Farm, Leigh, Tonbridge, Kent, TN11 8PS

Editor Andrew Pettie

Art & Design Director

Mark Hickling

Designer Susanna Hickling

Production

Sarah Epton

Contributors

Andy Smith (including cover), Kate Hale, Andy Forshaw, Christopher Lloyd, Andrés Lozano, Julie Beer, Mark Long, Susanna Hickling, May, Paige Towler, Lisa Thomas, Chris Harrison

With thanks to

Andy Forshaw, Natalie Bellos, Casey Neumann, Katy Lennon, Daisy Symes, Helen Thewlis, Olivia Galyer, Nell Wood, Helen Jones and the whole team at What on Earth Publishing

Editorial Consultant

Nancy Feresten

Business Development

David Falzani

CEO, What on Earth Magazines

Christopher Lloyd

For Encyclopaedia Britannica

Alison Eldridge, Managing Editor

Printing and distribution

Warners Midlands PLC, The Maltings, Manor Lane, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE1O 9PH

Digital Marketing

Jamie French

Editorial enquiries

editor@britannicamagazine.com

Subscriptions

O1778 392479

britannicamagazine.co.uk

Picture credits

Selected library images from: Alamy; Getty Images; Shutterstock.

Snap It: World Nature Photography Awards

2O22 – Jake Mosher, Staffan Widstrand. British Wildlife Photography Awards 2O23 – Ed Phillips. Eureka: Susanna Hickling. Absolutely Everything: Lucy Hewett, Field Museum.

We

2OO/O DISCOUNT off any new subscription to Britannica Magazine. It’s the perfect birthday present for curious young minds!

PUZZLE ANSWERS

Jokes

& riddles

Tickle your ribs and tease your brain with our favourite gags and riddles, hand-picked by our jokes editor May.

Q What’s the definition of a dream job?

A Something you can do in your sleep!

Q What is a bird’s favourite type of biscuit?

A Chocolate chirp cookies!

Q Why was the lightning angry?

A Because someone stole its thunder!

Q Why did the pirate want a bar of soap?

A To wash herself ashore!

What do you call a funny chicken?

Q How can you make a fire with just one stick?

A If it’s a matchstick!

Q What do you call an untrustworthy frog?

A An am-fib-ian!

What is a gymnast’s favourite pudding?

Q What runs around a house but cannot move?

A A fence!

Q What do you call an ingenious fish?

A Minnow-vative!

Q How do you say sorry in dots and dashes?

A Re-Morse code!

How do astronauts wash their hair?

Q Why did the teacher get glasses?

A Because she couldn’t control her pupils!

In a meteor shower!

Q What is the best thing about elevator jokes?

A They’re funny on so many levels!

Q Why are potatoes good at hide and seek?

Q What has a neck but no head, and two arms but no hands?

A A shirt!

What is a gymnast’s second favourite pudding?

A They keep their eyes peeled!

Jam roly-poly! Banana splits!

Q What is easy to get into but hard to get out of?

A Trouble!

Q How do you stop a rhinoceros from charging?

A By taking away its plug adaptor!

Q How many numbers between 1 and 100 have the letter ‘a’ in their spellings?

A None!

Three amazing special offers!

12-MONTH MAGAZINE PLAN O FFER 1

Sign up now for £59.99 to receive:

✓ A year’s worth of printed magazines delivered through your door

✓ FREE access to our digital editions

✓ FREE sign-up gift of Britannica’s All New Children’s Encyclopedia WORTH £25!

FREEINCLUDES WORTHBOOK £25!

3 FREE ISSUES O FFER 2

Sign up now for £44.99 to receive:

✓ A year’s worth of printed magazines delivered through your door

✓ FREE first three issues

✓ FREE access to our digital editions

6-MONTH MAGAZINE PLAN O FFER 3

Sign up now for £29.99 to receive:

✓ 6 months’ worth of printed magazines delivered through your door

✓ FREE access to our digital editions

✓ FREE sign-up gift of Britannica’s FACTopia! Follow the Trail of 4OO Facts WORTH £1O!

FREEINCLUDES WORTHBOOK £1O!