Ten Facts About 2010

FACT ONE

Although there is no official way of pronouncing this year, the results of most online polls suggest that most people will pronounce it "Twenty-Ten" as opposed to "Two Thousand and Ten."

FACT TWO
2010 should mark the retirement of the Space Shuttle, a resuable space vehicle that has been in use since 1981. It is expected that the Space Shuttle Discovery will be the final shuttle of the fleet to make the journey to space and back. The Space Shuttle will be replaced by the Orion spacecraft, which could eventually take humans back to the Moon, a place not visited since 1972! The first flight of an Orion spacecraft is not scheduled to launch until 2014 at the earliest.

FACT THREE
A 1995 episode of The Simpsons ("Lisa's Wedding") flashed forward to 2010, a year in which Lisa Simpson would marry Hugh Parkfield, a British student she met at University.

FACT FOUR
The 1999 arcade game Crazy Taxi features the track "Ten in 2010" by Bad Religion. It predicts that the the population of the world will have reached 10 billion by the year 2010. In fact, the population now is just under 7 billion.

FACT FIVE
2010 is the year in which the 21st Winter Olympics will take place. Vancouver, Canada will host the event in February, the second time the country has been host to the Winter Olympics. In June, the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals will begin in South Africa. This will be the 19th football World Cup and the first to be held in Africa.

FACT SIX
The film 2010 is the sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Released in 1984, it tells the story of a joint Soviet-American mission to travel to Jupiter and find out what happened to the first film's Discovery One spaceship and its astronauts.

FACT SEVEN
2010 is a big year for two of Britain's biggest television programmes. The country's longest running soap opera, Coronation Street, will celebrate its 50th anniversary in December 2010. Its main competitor, BBC's EastEnders, will mark its 25th anniversary in February. Australian soap, Neighbours, which was hugely popular in the late 1980s, will also celebrate its 25th anniversary this year.

FACT EIGHT
2010 is the Chinese year of the Tiger. This year, Chinese New Year begins on 14th February.

FACT NINE
There will be a General Election in Britain sometime within the next six months. This will give the British a chance to choose a new Prime Minister or re-elect the existing leader.

FACT TEN
On 4th January (Monday), the Burj Khalifa skyscraper will officially open in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This building is the tallest manmade structure ever built. It stands at 828 metres (2,717 feet).