7 Encyclopedia Facts You Can Use in a Conversation with Various Professionals ...

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If you’ve ran out of topics to discuss with a dedicated historian or he finally took a break and is now eagerly awaiting for you to say something, here’s an interesting, easy to remember, historic fact. The war between UK and Zanzibar (27 August 1896) was the shortest war in history. It lasted about 40 minutes and the United Kingdom won.

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Morgan Robertson’s novel Futility, describes the sinking of the world’s largest ship, Titan. This was written in 1898 –14 years before the Titanic incident happened! The Titanic and the ship from Robertson’s novel were very similar and they both suffered the same destiny. Mention this to your writer/poet friend and you will definitely score some major conversation points.

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I know, I know, chemistry can be a really difficult thing to talk about. So, if the strange paths life sometimes leads us somehow involve you talking to a chemist, asking questions is the best tactics. Say that you have heard that intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair, ask for an explanation and just listen.

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Great Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other one all in the same time. And not just that, this remarkable human was the one who invented the scissors! However, even a brilliant mind of his had its ups and downs… No wonder Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile has caused such a heated debate – it took Leonardo 10 years to paint it! And he was obviously so busy thinking about her lips that he completely forgot to pain a set of eyebrows.

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Colgate, the famous company that specializes in dental care products, had a really big problem to expand their business to Spain (and all the Spanish speaking countries). Guess why? Because its name “Colgate” spells and sounds very similar to the Spanish command, “Go hang yourself”. Now if this doesn’t make your chat buddy’s jaw drop just tell him that a dentist was the one to invent the electric chair.

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Here’s one fun equation to mention: 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 Check the calculator, it really works! Even better, ask the person to take out his/her calculator, dictate the numbers and demonstrate that playing with the numbers for non-scientific purposes can be a real blast.

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Santa obviously knew nothing about reindeers because if he had, he would have picked different names for them. You see if you ask your friend about reindeers, he will tell you that unlike male reindeers that drop the antlers before the winter comes, female ones keep them until the next spring. And, since Santa’s reindeers all have their antlers, they couldn’t have been males. Yet, they all have male names. Now, isn’t that an interesting thing to talk about?

So, tell me, have you ever been in a situation where you don’t know what to say? I really hate that awkward silence where both sides sweat trying to think of the next thing to say! Has that ever happened to you? What are your favorite “silence-breaker” lines? Hope you’ll find these facts interesting enough to use in a conversation.

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