Below is a list of strange stories. Some are true, some I made up. Can you guess which are which?
Billion Dollar Day
A currency trader once made a one billion dollar profit in a single day.
City Raising
In the 1860's, one of the ten largest cities in the U.S. suffered from drainage problems. This was solved by lifting most downtown buildings several feet and moving other buildings to higher ground.
Fuel
By dollar value traded, coffee is the world's #2 commodity after petroleum.
Great Stork Derby
Over a period of ten years, women competed to produce the most babies in order to win a prize. The winners had nine babies each and shared the prize.
Jump
Professional daredevil Felix Baumgartner set a world record in 2012 by skydiving from an altitude of 24 miles in a project sponsored by Red Bull. The record was broken two years later by a computer scientist who worked at Google.
Keep on Ticking
Astronomers of the ancient Hittite empire built mechanical computers which could calculate square roots and logarithms to five decimal places and predict solar eclipses years in advance.
McScraper
The "World's Smallest Skyscraper" stands 40 feet tall. It was constructed as part of a scam in which money was raised based on plans for a 480-foot tall office building. In fact, the blueprints approved by the investors showed a height of 480 inches.
Mummy Brown
For centuries, Egyptian mummies were ground up to make paint. The practice continued until the supply of mummies ran out.
Oman, Must be Nice
Citizens of an independent emirate bordering Oman have an official unemployment rate over 80%, yet most live comfortably with government-provided education, housing, health care, and an annual stipend of about $35,000.
¡Soy del Norte!
In the 1970s, U.S. courts ruled that people born in a Mexican town south of the Rio Grande were in fact U.S. citizens. The river had changed course in 1906, causing several hundred acres of land to be on the Mexican side.
EDIT: The solution
I have heard the McScraper story before, I think they're all true. wasoxygen, an entirely one-sided true/false test once scarred me in my childhood, ya big meanie.
Black Wednesday the billion dollar day is real, as is the skyscraper.