Ajit Kumar

* Smoking causes wrinkles, acne, yellow teeth, bad breath, heart disease, cancer.

* Cigarettes contain arsenic, formaldehyde, lead, hydrogen cyanide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, ammonia and 43 known carcinogens.

* Urea, a chemical compound that is a major component in urine, is used to add “flavor” to cigarettes.

* Ninety percent of all U.S. smokers start smoking as teenagers.

* Each day in California 300 youth light up for the first time, about one-third of them will die from a tobacco related disease.

* Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S.

* Nicotine has been classified as a class 1 insecticide.

* Smoking-related diseases cause an estimated 440,000 American deaths each year.

* Every 8 seconds, someone in the world dies from tobacco related issues.

* Of every 100,000 15 year old smokers, tobacco will prematurely kill at least 20,000 before the age of 70.

* The tobacco industry burns as much as one acre of forest for every acre of tobacco cured, using 12% of all the timber felled in the world.

Tobacco Facts

* Cigarettes can contain more than 4,000 ingredients, which, when burned, can also produce over 200 ‘compound’ chemicals. Many of these ‘compounds’ have been linked to lung damage.

* A cigarette-manufacturing machine uses four miles of paper per hour to roll and package cigarettes.

* In Brazil, the country’s 100,000 tobacco farmers need the wood of 60 million trees a year.

* Several active ingredients and special methods of production are involved in making sure the nicotine in a cigarette is many times more potent than that of a tobacco plant.

* Sugar approximates to roughly 20% of a cigarette, and many diabetics are unaware of this secret sugar intake. Also, the effect of burning sugar is unknown.

* Smoking is a major contributor to strokes.

* In the U.S., all cigarette butts thrown away in 1993 weighed as much as 30,800 large elephants.

* According to the World Health Organization, approximately 25% of cigarettes sold around the world are smuggled.

* In most countries around the world, the legal age for the purchase of tobacco products is now 18, raised from 16, while in Japan the age minimum is 20 years old.

Amazing Earth Facts

* The Persian Gulf is the warmest sea. In the summer its temperature reaches 35.6 degrees centigrade.

* Far and away, the coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was -129 Fahrenheit (-89 Celsius) at Vostok, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.

* Approximately 40,000 tons of meteoric dust hits the Earth each year.

* About 400 billion gallons water is used worldwide each day.

* The shore of the Dead Sea in the Middle East is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) below sea level. Not even a close second is Bad Water in Death Valley, California, at a mere 282 feet below sea level.

* Sunlight can penetrate clean ocean water to a depth of 240 feet.

* A Red Giant(a kind of exploded star) has a lower density than any vacuum here on earth.

* From a distance, Earth would be the brightest of the 9 planets. This is because sunlight is reflected by the planet’s water.

* Lloro, Colombia averages 523.6 inches of rainfall a year, or more than 40 feet (13 meters). That’s about 10 times more than fairly wet major cities in Europe or the United States.

* If you dig in your backyard, don’t worry about running into the earth’s core. You’d have to dig a hole 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) deep!

* Venus rotates so slowly that in a typical day lasts approximately 244 Earth days (5,856 hours).

* The deepest depth in the ocean is 36,198 feet (6.9 miles or 11 kilometers) at the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific Ocean well south of Japan near the Mariana Islands.

* The highest, or should we say the biggest, waterfall in the world is Angel Falls of Venezuela, dropping from a height of a whopping 3,212 feet.

* When astronauts first went into the space, they looked back at the Earth with human eyes for the first time, and called our home the Blue Planet. And it’s no surprise. 70% of our planet is covered with oceans. The remaining 30% is the solid ground, rising above sea level.

* The world’s deadliest recorded earthquake occurred in 1557 in central China, more than 830,000 people were killed.

* A Blue Earth, Minnesota, law declares that no child under the age of twelve may talk over the telephone unless monitored by a parent.

* Earth is tipped at 23 and 1/2 degrees in orbit. That axis is what causes our seasons.

* If the entire water in the ocean in evaporated, and the salt produced from this spread evenly over the whole planet, the planet would lie beneath a 500 ft layer of salt.

* About 70 percent. And if you had to replace it all, you’d need 60 years of the entire globe’s rainfall, and then you’d have to figure out a way to freeze it all.

* Some scientists believe that the earth began billions of years ago as a huge ball of swirling dust and gases.