Ten things you never knew about... temperature

In many parts of the country, temperatures this week have been close to record levels, so here are some facts about temperatures.

TEMPERATURE Too hot to handle TEMPERATURE: Too hot to handle

1. The highest temperature ever recorded in the shade was 57.8C (136F) in Libya on September 13, 1922.

2. When Anders Celsius first devised the temperature scale named after him, it had 100 as the freezing point of water and zero as its boiling point, so the colder anything got, the higher its temperature.

3. The scale was reversed the year after Celsius died.

4. The inside of a cucumber can be as much as 11 Celsius degrees cooler than the outside temperature.

5. The average temperature on Mars is –63C.

6. The insect known as the temperature cricket is so called because you can calculate the temperature from its rate of chirping.

7. The word ‘temperature’ originally referred to the action of ‘tempering’, or mixing. It then came to be used of ‘temperate’ climates, where hot and cold are sensibly mixed, then finally took its modern sense.

8. The average temperature at the North Pole is –18C and at the South Pole it is –50C.

9. The temperature at the centre of the Sun is believed to be about 15 million degrees Celsius.

10. The balls at Wimbledon are stored at a temperature of 20C (68F) until needed.

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