Учебное пособие по темам "SEASONS AND WEATHER" и "TIME". Волошина Г.Н - 52 стр.

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PART 3. Time
1. Text A
If I want to know the time I look at my watch. I have got a gold wrist-watch
with a leather strap. It keeps fairly good time, but occasionally it goes wrong.
Sometimes it is three minutes slow, sometimes it is a minute fast. When it does
that I take it to a watchmaker and have it repaired, cleaned and regulated.
“What time is it?” is an age-old question. Here are some of the ways man
has found an answer. In ancient times Chinese travellers designed a unique
alarm clock. They simply stuck a piece of slow-burning incense between their
toes as they slept by the side of the road. When the incense burnt down to the
traveller’s toes, he awoke with a start!
Since the earliest times man has found it necessary to keep track of time.
Probably our earliest ancestors took advantage of the greatest of all time-pieces -
the sun. By the shadows it cast along familiar landmarks, the caveman probably
marked the passing of his day. This was the beginning of the sundial.
To tell the time at night people invented the water clock. In desert countries
water was often hard to find but sand was always available. The sand clock was
made by joining two small-necked glass globes together so that sand could run
slowly from one to another in an hour’s time.
Some of today’s world-famous clocks were constructed centuries ago. One
of the most remarkable clocks was built in 1530 in Berne, Switzerland. Not only
does it give a miniature performance every hour, but it also shows the day of the
week, the date, the position of the sun and the phases of the moon.
A year is the average time, it takes the Earth to go once round the sun. There
are 12 months or 52 weeks, or 365 days in a year. Every four years there is a
leap year. This has 366 days. The English names of the months are of Latin ori-
gin: January was named after Janus, the god of Time. March was called after
Mars, the god of War. July was named after Julius Caesar and so on. We all
know the names of the months, but not all of us can quite remember how many
days there are in each month. Here is a little poem that will help us:
Thirty days have September,
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one.
February has twenty-eight alone,
Excepting leap year, that’s the time
When February’s days are twenty-nine.
There are seven days in a week. The names of the days are very old, they
were chosen in the days when people worshipped a different god each day. Sun-
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