Days, weeks and months Lesson 111 of the world course of Mova's primary school: 22 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 A week has 7 days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. 1 Many weekday names come from the sky: Sunday from the Sun, Monday from the Moon, Saturday from the planet Saturn. 2 Months are a bit longer than 4 weeks. 3 Most have 30 or 31 days, while 4 weeks is only 28. 4 That is why a year is not 12 × 4 = 48 weeks but 52 weeks and 1 day: 52 × 7 = 364, plus 1 makes 365. 5 Two old tricks tell you how long each month is. 6 The rhyme: "Thirty days hath September, April, June and November" ("hath" is old English for "has"), all the rest have 31 except February. 7 And the knuckle trick: make two fists and count the months along the knuckles and the dips between them; knuckle months have 31 days, dip months fewer, and July and August sit on two knuckles side by side. 8 Why 7 days in a week? 9 There are several reasons and nobody is completely sure: the ancient Babylonians used it, the Bible tells of 7 days, people could see 7 objects moving in the sky (the Sun, the Moon and five planets), and the Moon changes from new to half to full in roughly 7-day steps. 10 Time words help plan: a "fortnight" is 14 days, and "every other Thursday" means every second Thursday, 14 days apart. 11 A week has 7 days, and a normal year has 52 weeks and 1 day, which is 365 days. 12 4 weeks is 28 days, but most months have 30 or 31 days, so a year is not 48 weeks. 13 September, April, June and November have 30 days; January, March, May, July, August, October and December have 31. 14 February has 28 days, or 29 in a leap year. 15 In the knuckle trick, months that land on a knuckle have 31 days, and months that land in a dip have fewer. 16 Weekdays are Monday to Friday; in Britain, the USA and most countries the weekend is Saturday and Sunday. 18 The day after the day after Tuesday is Thursday. 19 June has only 30 days, so there is no 31 June; the day after 30 June is 1 July. 20 A fortnight is 14 days; the word comes from old English "fourteen nights", and a date a fortnight later falls on the same weekday. 22 The 7-day week has several possible origins, including ancient Babylon, the Bible's 7 days, the 7 moving objects people could see in the sky, and the Moon's phases about a week apart. 23 Words people use: "close but no cigar" means nearly right but wrong, "bins" means rubbish collection (UK), "bairn" means child, "aye" means yes, "ken" means know and "dinnae" means don't (Scotland). ← previous Why time flies and why it dragsnext → Leap years and 29 February birthdays↑ back to World This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/world/111-days-weeks-and-months/