Remembering the world’s tallest buildings

Hi friends!

Ok, so I was in a conversation and touched on the tallest buildings in the world, and I realized I have no idea what they’re called or where they’re located.

Dubai has something, right?

How tall is the new World Trade Center?

So I thought, hey, I can just look this up and learn the interesting bits, right?

So I did, and here’s the gist!

First off, we need to define tallest. I chose the buildings with structures that reach the highest above ground, not have the highest floor. This makes a difference for buildings with very tall masts or antennae, for example.

Another thing is to round numbers. Remembering 921.18 is a lot harder than 920, so I’ll be rounding the height of buildings to something reasonable in the quizzes.

Third, there are MANY tall buildings with their own unique names, locations, and heights. Remembering all the details feel a bit pointless to me, so here I’ll focus on whatever turns out to be most interesting.

With that out of the way, it turns out Dubai, United Arab Emirates indeed does have something, namely the world’s tallest building! It’s called Burj Khalifa and is around 830 m or 2720 feet tall!

The new world trade center in New York, USA is called One World Trade Center and is indeed also on the list (7th place) and is about 450 m / 1800 ft tall.

A surprise for me is that Malaysia is second place with a building called Merdeka 118 that’s 680 m or 2230 ft tall. Way to go! It’s located in Kuala Lumpur, by the way.

Less surprising is that China dominates the list and has 5 of the world’s 10 tallest buildings, their tallest being Shanghai Tower at 630 m / 2100 ft. And yes, it’s in Shanghai, China.

Other countries on the list are Saudi Arabia and South Korea.

Let’s interrupt this broadcast with a quiz to help your memory! Just like in my previous post about Roman Numbers, try to remember before clicking to reveal the answers!

Let’s continue!

Having some idea of the spread of heights is interesting, so if we compare the tallest to the 10th tallest, we see there’s about a 300 m / 1000 ft difference. Pretty cool, huh? That difference of 300 m / 1000 ft is pretty tall for a building all by itself.

Another interesting bit of information is that Europe, Africa, and Oceania isn’t even on the top 10 list! It is dominated by Asia and the Middle East with one entry from North America.

Here’s the full list to give you a better overview:

1. Burj Khalifa - 830 m / 2700 ft (Dubai, United Arab Emirates)
2. Merdeka 118 - 680 m / 2200 ft (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
3. Shanghai Tower - 630 m / 2100 ft (Shanghai, China)
4. Abraj Al-Bait Towers - 601 m / 1971 ft (Mecca, Saudi Arabia)
5. Ping An Finance Center - 599 m / 1965 ft (Shenzhen, China)
6. Lotte World Tower - 556 m / 1823 ft (Seoul, South Korea)
7. One World Trade Center - 546 m / 1792 ft (New York City, USA)
8. Tianjin CTF Finance Centre - 530 m / 1740 ft (Tianjin, China)
9. Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre - 530 m / 1739 ft (Guangzhou, China)
10. China Zun - 528 m / 1732 ft (Beijing, China)

(I got this list from Wikipedia.)

Let’s do another quiz before we wrap up!

Thank you for reading!

I think this is enough for now. I’ll include more repetitions of this in future emails to help you remember this over time. :)

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