How confident are you on general knowledge? Do you know how many legs a centipede or a millipede really has?
Perhaps the reason we believe—or at least don’t question white lies—is because we have always had them. From Santa Claus to the Easter Bunny, our childhoods were practice for believing what we are told. We do this because it is just easier to believe instead of questioning it.
Perhaps the best example of this is the flat Earth myth. It is a general consensus that those in the Middle or Dark Ages thought that the world was flat and that we were capable of falling off it. However, the fact of it is that until around 1880, no-one would have told you the world was flat. In fact, in the 2000 years leading up to 1880, the world was considered round. The only argument about it was the size.
So should we have to doublecheck the information we are given? In the society we live in we absorb so much—do we really have to check every little bit. Obviously not. The majority of information is fairly accurate. However, it may interest you to find out what bits of our general knowledge are completely off the mark…
Things you may not know:
• ‘I before E except after C’ has more words as
exceptions then those that obey the rule.
• Newton never got his idea for gravity from
anything hitting his head.
• The Great Wall of China cannot be seen from the
Moon or from space by the naked eye
• Centipedes and millipedes have neither one
hundred nor one thousand legs; the common
centipede has between 20 to 300 legs, while the
millipede has between 40 to 400, although the
rare species Illacme plenipes has up to 750.
For more fantastic reading on white lies, try Jeffrey B
Russell’s book The Myth of the Flat Earth.