Leap year

As it is February the 29th Jessica has been reading about the history of the leap year. She has taken some paragraphs from pages and added them to her own writing about this topic.

A leap year is every four years the fist people who discovered it was the Egyptians . they thought of adding a leap year to the calendar every four years. Later, the Romans copied the idea. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII reformed the Julian calendar (introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE). By Pope Gregory’s time the calendar had drifted 14 days off track.

 He neatly solved this by lopping ten days off the calendar, telling everyone that the day after October 4th was going to be October 15th. Bad luck for people with birthdays during that time!

The calendar is supposed to match the solar year, in other words, the length of time it takes for Earth to orbit the Sun once. But things aren’t quite that simple. It actually takes Earth 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds to complete its orbit (about 365 1/4 days). Those extra hours gradually add up so that after four years the calendar is out of step by about one day. Adding a day every four years allows the calendar to match up to the solar year again.