A. Just as early humans did, animals have some kind of concept of time in the sense that their bodies run on rhythms of sleeping, waking and eating — in other words, they probably understand the concept of periods of light and dark, of a ‘day’. Domesticated animals also tune in to the daily routine of their household and seem to understand that some things happen in a certain order or at certain times. For instance, it is not unusual for a pet, like a cat, to remind their owner to feed them at exactly the same time every day. B. The easy answer would be ‘so that we know what time we need to be at school or work in the morning’. The truth, though, is that even before humans had actual measurements of time, our existence was still directed by the basic rhythm of day and night, light and dark, summer and winter, and so on. Some of the earliest timekeeping devices were based around this too — like sundials, which tracked the passing of time during the course of the day by how the shadow of a static point moved (but they were pretty useless at night!). Also, think about the chaos that would exist in everyday life if we didn’t measure time, from setting up an appointment with a friend or doctor to using the train services.

C. So, everyone knows that a year is the 365 days it takes for the Earth to travel around the sun. Well, it turns out everyone is (slightly) wrong. The actual exact length of a year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds, which means that the year as we count it is actually nearly six hours short. Every four years, we make up for this by adding the missed hours together and making them into an extra day in February. Six hours might not seem like a big deal, but think about how inaccurate our calendar would be without that leap day: after a few hundred years, with all those sets of six hours added together, we would soon end up with a calendar that didn’t match with the seasons.

D. That’s an easy one, but interesting at the same time. If you look at one of our earlier answers, you’ll see we talked about sundials. In the northern hemisphere, when the sun moves through the sky, it creates a shadow on the dial that moves in the direction we now call ‘clockwise’. When clocks were first developed, clockmakers simply followed the same, familiar pattern so there was less chance of people misreading the time.

Task II. Read the texts again and write T for True, F for False or NM for Not Mentioned.(Written form)
1. Animals in a household seem to be able to track the times of everyday activities.
2. Sundials can only keep track of time during daylight hours.
3. It takes a bit less than 365 days for the Earth to travel around the sun.
4. Leap days were added to February because it is the shortest month.
5. Miscalculating the length of the year could have drastic consequences.
6. In early sundials, the dials moved around clockwise

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