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.
