35 "Facts" You Learned in School That Are Completely Wrong

35 "Facts" You Learned in School That Are Completely Wrong

16. We eat eight spiders a year during our sleep.

First of all, spiders have no interest in humans. And second, they'd probably be afraid of snoring, moving, breathing sleepers. It's not to say that swallowing a spider while you sleep is impossible, but that high number is definitely all myth.

17. Einstein was a failing student.

Albert Einstein received good grades, but he did not like the learning system. He didn't fail math as many believe, but he did fail the entrance exam to the Zurich Polytechnic his first try. He passed the math portion but failed the language, botany, and zoology sections — all were written in French, which he wasn't fluent in. He also took it at an impressive age of 16, about a year and half away from graduating high school. For someone who began reading college physics books at 11, he probably wasn't the worst student.

18. Seasons have to do with the Earth's proximity to the sun.

It makes sense that Summer occurs when the Earth is closest to the sun and Winter happens when it's furthest away. But it's the Earth's tilt that causes seasons, not its distance. Its tilted axis points in the same direction at all times as it orbits around the sun, and different parts of the planet receive the sun's rays throughout the year.

19. Throwing a penny off the Empire State Building can kill someone below.

False. MythBusters put it to the test and fired a gun with a penny inside with the same speed of it dropping to the ground. Though it stung, it didn't cause any injury, proving that it's just not possible for the penny to gain enough velocity to really hurt someone.

20. Bats are blind.

Bigger bats can see even better than humans can — three times better, in fact.

21. Humans evolved from monkeys.

Though we share a common ancestor with some primates, we did not magically jump directly from primate to man. Humans, apes, gorillas, and chimps, for example, all branch off to different evolutionary paths.

22. Rosa Parks gave up her seat because she was tired.

As most of us know, Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. Though it's commonly said that her reason for not getting up was because she was simply tired, her autobiography says otherwise. "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired," she wrote. "But that isn't true. I was not tired physically. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

23. Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb.

Edison shouldn't be the only person who gets credit for the light bulb because several others contributed to its invention before him. He was, however, the one who filed a patent for it.

24. It takes seven years to digest gum.

If you swallow a piece of gum, the longest it'll stay in your digestive system is a week. Nothing will live inside your body for years at length unless the food item was so big (like larger than a quarter) that it becomes trapped in your stomach or intestine. Gum will eventually come out one way or another.

25. Thanksgiving was a peaceful gathering of Pilgrims and Native Americans.

Most of what you've heard about Thanksgiving as a kid was inaccurate, but that's probably because you were also too young to learn the truth about what really went down. As you probably now know, Thanksgiving was more than just an Autumn harvest between the colonists and Wampanoag Indians.

When more settlers arrived in the New World, they brought a plague with them, which wiped out more than half of the native population. This sparked a fight for land and a rough relationship between both parties. Though there was a three-day feast, it's still not clear whether the Wampanoags were invited or if they crashed. There are several versions and theories of the truth about Thanksgiving, but none of them are a nice tale.