Học tiếng Anh: căn nguyên tháng 2 có 28 ngày

Phần 1

Although February 2015 might …(1)…perfectly on the page every year it's the runt of the monthly litter. This deficit of days, this calendar …(2)…, this oddity of the annum, like so much of …(3)…culture, is the Romans' fault. Here's the crazy story of why February has 28 days… except when it doesn't.

Romulus, the maybe-mythical, maybe-real …(4)…and first king of Rome, had a problem. With an increasing number of festivals, feasts, military ceremonies, and religious celebrations to keep track of, Romans needed a …(5)…to organize all of them. Ancient astronomers already had accurate calculations for the time between two …(6)…equinoxes or solstices, but nature had given people a nice, easy pie chart in the sky to track the passage of time, so early Rome, like many other cultures, worked off a …(7)…

The calendar of the Romulan republic had ten months of either 30 or 31 days, beginning in March and ending in December, and we can still see traces of that calendar today. Problem was, that year was a few days short of four …(8)… Romans were too busy not dying during winter to count those 61 and a quarter extra days… they'd just khởi động the next year on the new moon before the …(9)…equinox. It's actually not a bad …(10)…, as long as you don't have to figure out what day it is between December and March.

>>Làm tiếp phần 2
>>Xem lời giải phần 1

Từ mới: 

runt : con vật còi cọc nhất trong một lứa sinh

litter: lứa

deficit : sự thiếu hụt

oddity : kỳ quặc

feasts: những bữa tiệc

keep track of: theo dõi

astronomers: nhà thiên văn

equinoxes : ngày Xuân phân (ngày và đêm dài bằng nhau)

solstices: điểm chí (một trong hai lần trong năm khi mặt trời ở xa xích đạo nhất về phía Bắc hoặc phía Nam)

figure out: hiểu, luận ra

Phiêu Linh