Original photo by Everett Collection Inc/ Alamy Stock Photo
Herbert Hoover’s time in office isn’t remembered especially fondly, dominated as it was by the Great Depression, but no one can deny the 31st president’s intelligence.
A member of Stanford’s inaugural class, Hoover is credited with saving as many as 10 million lives during World War I by leading America’s efforts to provide food to Europe’s most devastated areas. Hoover and his wife Lou Henry Hoover also lived and worked in China around the turn of the 20th century, and they both spoke fluent Mandarin — a skill they used to evade eavesdroppers during their time in the White House.
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It's a factAbout 940 million people speak it as a first language, with an additional 400 million speakers of other Chinese dialects bringing the total number of Chinese speakers to 1.3 billion.
That wasn’t their only lingual feat, as the couple also spent several years translating De Re Metallica, a 16th-century text on metallurgy and mining, from German to English, for which they won an award from the Mining and Metallurgical Society. Lou was especially skilled with languages, having also achieved fluency in Latin, Spanish, German, Italian, and French. Hoover served just one term as president, as he was soundly defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, and his 31-year retirement was the longest in presidential history until it was surpassed by that of Jimmy Carter.
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Herbert Hoover’s vice president was ______.
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Herbert Hoover’s vice president was Charles Curtis.
India recently overtook China as the world’s most populous country.
From the time the United Nations first began keeping records in 1950, China had been widely known as the world’s most populous country — a title it had likely already held for decades if not centuries prior to those records. That reign came to an end in April 2023, when India’s population reached 1,425,775,850, surpassing the number of people in China. As of 2025, the populations of India and China are estimated at 1.46 billion and 1.41 billion, respectively.
The Middle Kingdom’s population has been declining for years due to decreasing birth rates. India’s growth rate has been slowing as well, but not enough to prevent it from becoming the most populous country in the world; an average of 86,000 babies were born in India every day at the time it overtook China, which reported just 49,000 births a day. India’s population is expected to peak at 1.7 billion in 2064.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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