科学美国人60秒 SSS 2014-01-01
时间：2018-12-24 作者：英语课 分类：2014年Scientific American(一)月
英语课
Haappy New Year. And don’t feel bad about taking today off. After all, you’ve travelled far, and I’m not talking about the trip home from the party.
According to NASA, just by being on the planet Earth in the last year, you’ve zipped about 584 million miles around the Sun to get back where you were - on/at an average speed of about 67,000 miles per hour. Again, not talking about the drive home from the party, of course the trip was not a perfect circle. As Kepler show, the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse with the sun at one of the two focal points.
You/he also figured out the planet goes faster when it’s at perihelion near the sun then/than when it’s at aphelion 1, its furthest distance. Which would explain why summer seems to zip by except the seasons are (the) function of the tilt 2 of the Earth’s access/axis, not it's/its different distances from the Sun.
And the Earth rotated 3 [365 and a quater]365.25 times during it's/its sweep around the Sun. The trip took 8,766 hours, or 31,557,600 seconds, or 525,960 minutes, just like this one.
1 aphelion
n.远日点；远核点
- The point in the orbit nearest the sun is called perihelion,while the point farthest is called aphelion.在轨道上最接近太阳的点被称为近日点，而最远离太阳的点被称为远日点。
- But it's not that simple either,because the dates of the perihelion and aphelion are also shifting.但这并不是简单的一件事情,因为近日点和远日点的日期都会变换。