Ballpark

Puzzle #37 · 26 October 2026

The five questions from that day's Ballpark, each with its answer, the fact behind it and a link to the source. Rather play it first? It is in the archive.

1. How many passengers were carried on scheduled airline flights worldwide in 2019, according to ICAO?

4.5B passengers

4.5 billion passengers on 38.3 million departures, 3.6% more than in 2018. It was the last full year before the pandemic. Source

Image: Daniel Case · CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped

2. About how many cups of tea are drunk in the UK each day?

100M cups

About 100 million cups a day, says the UK's tea trade association — almost 36 billion a year. Source

Image: Vanderdecken · Public domain

3. How many pages are in the 20-volume second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989?

21,730 pages

21,730 pages holding 59 million words. The printed text weighs 62.6 kg, and the longest entry is for the verb 'set'. Source

Image: Dan (mrpolyonymous) · CC BY 2.0, cropped

4. About how many galaxies did the Hubble Space Telescope capture in its 2004 Ultra Deep Field image?

10,000 galaxies

About 10,000 galaxies, in an exposure a million seconds long. Some are among the first galaxies to emerge after the Big Bang. Source

Image: NASA/ESA · Public domain

5. How tall was the tallest sunflower on record, measured in Indiana in September 2025?

1,090 centimeters

1,090 cm (10.90 m, or 35 ft 9 in), grown by Alex Babich in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The sunflower is the national flower of his native Ukraine. Source

Image: Timothy Akolamazima · CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped