General Knowledge
Exploring "Why" questions about General Knowledge
481 articles
Why bands perform with heaps of amps/speakers on stage instead of connecting to the venues PA system.
My band uses both our own towers *and* the venue PA system: The speakers (or rather, monitors) that are in front of us are used to hear ourselves play, in case our in-ear monitoring system fails. Opti
Why does cereal need to be in a bag in a box when dry pasta doesn’t need a bag before being put into a box?
We want cereal to stay crisp, because we don't intend to cook it before eating it. And because it has loads of rough surface area, it absorbs humidity fast.
Why is affirmative action still around?
The easiest way i can explain it is affirmative action is a set of guidelines and goals to reduce and reverse historical trends of minority groups being deprived of social and economic opportunities n
Why has Botswana done so well compared to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa?
Tiny country with giant diamond reserves and made a deal with DeBeers early on where Botswana gets 70% of the money and DeBeers runs the diamond mines for them. A lot of African countries kicked all t
Why are there “runts” of, for instance, a litter of puppies?
They were just born smaller then the rest, and when it comes to feeding time they get pushed to the side by the bigger puppies. Why it happens is just genetics, they got the short straw and ended up a
why are latitude lines parallel, but longitudinal lines converge at the polls?
Because it makes the most sense. If you walk east/west, you're only changing longitude, if you walk north/south, you're only changing latitude. If longitude were defined like latitude, only orthogonal
Why does time move at the speed it does?
How would you know the difference if it ran at any other speed? It would still be "normal" to you.
Why is it so difficult to swallow when you look up, or tilt your head backwards?
Because tilting your head back opens your airway and they can't both be open at the same time.
Why do some people say, ‘on accident,’ and others say, ‘by accident’?
Someone said "on accident" by accident, never owned up to the mistake and it caught on
Why do we capitalise all words except conjunctions and some prepositions in titles?
Convention, at heart. It used to be that writers capitalized all letters. Then, some time passed, and they capitalized only nouns and beginnings of sentences.