10 Things You Should Know – Episode II

Friends, here is this week's list of 10 Things You Should Know. 


(Read Episode I of Things You Should Know.)


1. Employees who return to their previous places of work are called boomerang employees.


2. Operation Vijay was the codename of the military operation launched to liberate Goa, Daman, & Diu from the colonial rule of Portugal, in 1961.  

3. Walmart is the largest company in the world by revenue, with sales of U.S.$421 billion in 2011. Headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, it was founded by Samuel Moore ‘Sam’ Walton in 1962.  

4. A Lusophone is someone who speaks the Portuguese language, either as a native, as an additional language, or as a learner. The word comes from Lusitania, an ancient Roman province which covered most of the part of the Iberian Peninsula that is today the Republic of Portugal and part of Spain. Brazil is the largest lusophone country in the world. 

5. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is a co-founder of Facebook. At school, he loved math and astronomy while excelling in the Classical studies. In fact, on his college application, Zuckerberg listed as non-English languages he could read and write: French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek! 

6. A Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde invented =, the ‘equals’ sign in 1557. He is the author of ‘The Grounde of Artes’, the first book in English on algebra.


7. Durex is a portmanteau of ‘Durability, Reliability, and Excellence’.


8. Mumbai was originally built on seven islands. In 1782, Governor William Hornby launched Hornby Vellard, a project to unite all the seven islands into a single island, a task which was completed by 1838. 

9. George Bush once locked Colin Powell (Secretary of State) out of a meeting for being late.  

10. Karl Marx’s mother once quipped this about her famous son: “If only Karl had made capital instead of writing about it!”