Free Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers by Bathroom Readers’ Institute

central Oregon coast. But the answer is…Nebraska. More than a quarter of this land-locked state is made up of grass-stabilized sand dunes that are as much as 330 feet high. They’re located in western Nebraska in an area called the Sand Hills that covers roughly 20,000 square miles. According to geologists, the dunes were once part of an ancient inland sea that dried up more than 100,000 years ago.
Continental Division
    Egypt. Most of it sits on the African continent, but the northeastern part of the country—the Sinai Peninsula—is located in Asia. Turkey and Russia could be the answer, in that both countries sit partly in Asia and partly in Europe, but those two continents form a single land mass now commonly referred to as Eurasia. Egypt, however, is truly a country of two continents. This mostly Arab, mostly Muslim, nation has about 80 million people—95 percent of whom live along the Nile River. It boasts the largest population in the Middle East and the third-largest in Africa.
    Footnote: Another country that many people claim belongs to two continents is Panama. However, it’s a common misconception that the Panama Canal separates North and South America—it doesn’t. According to most geographers, South America starts at the Colombian border.
     
Mammoth Lakes
    North America has three of the five largest lakes in the world. What are they? What and where are the other two?

Mini-Mammoth Lake
    What’s the largest lake in the U.S. after the Great Lakes? What’s the largest lake after that one?

The Real Mammoth Lake
    Where is the real Mammoth Lake?

     
Mammoth Lakes
    The five biggest lakes in the world:
    1 . The Caspian Sea, which borders four countries in Europe and Asia, is 143,000 square miles.
    2 . Lake Superior, in North America, is 31,820 square miles.
    3 . Africa’s Lake Victoria, at 26,828 square miles, is the largest tropical lake in the world.
    4 . Lake Huron, in North America, is 23,010 square miles.
    5 . Lake Michigan, in the U.S., is 22,400 square miles.
Mini-Mammoth Lake
    The Great Salt Lake in Utah, at 1,700 square miles, is the largest lake in the U.S. that’s not a Great Lake. It’s the only body of water left over from an ancient inland sea known as Lake Bonneville, which once covered much of western North America. The next largest U.S. lake is Okeechopee in Florida—it’s 730 square miles.
The Real Mammoth Lake
    There is none. Mammoth Lakes (notice the plural) is actually a geographic region in California’s Eastern Sierra mountains. The town and surrounding area are revered for snow-capped peaks, ancient forests, waterfalls, and some very pretty lakes. How did it get its name? Not because of any woolly mammoth fossils, but because of gold: The area was first settled by the Mammoth Mining Company after prospectors discovered gold there.
     
United Streets of America
    What is the most common street name in the United States?

Fitting In
    Cartographically speaking, what do Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., have in common?

Next-Door Neighbors
    What’s the longest shared border between two countries? What’s the busiest border between two countries?

     
United Streets of America
    Did you guess Main Street or First Street? It’s neither. Answer: Second Street. Why wouldn’t First be first? Because a town wouldn’t normally have a First Street unless it also had a Second Street (and a Third and a Fourth, and so on). So why aren’t First and Second more or less tied? Turns out that many small towns have a main street (often called Main Street) that they count as their number-one route through town—their first street, so to speak, but not their First Street. They actually start counting at Second Street. Subtract the number of First/Main Streets that have been renamed to honor a prominent citizen, and it’s easy to see why Second is really first.
Fitting In
    Look in any atlas. On the page that has