Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Days of thy youth...Ecclesiastes 12:1

S had, what looked like, a fairly straightforward exercise in his reading workbook this morning. It was simply a series of questions in which he was to circle the correct answer.
Which is longer? day year

Which is colder? ice water

et cetera

He read the first question out loud, "Which is longer? A DAY!" Then he circled the corresponding answer.

"A day? Are you sure?" I questioned.

"Of course! I'm on Venus today!"

We had a short discussion about how, yes, the days on Venus are longer than a Venus year, but the workbook publisher is on Earth, so they probably are expecting an Earthly answer.

Fine. He erased his circle and circled the correct answer.

"Which is colder? Ice??? What is ice? There is no ice on Venus."

Fun facts about Venus:

Venus orbits the sun about once every 225 earth days.

A Venus rotation takes 245 earth days (so the day IS longer than the year).

The temperature on Venus remains fairly constant due to the heavy cloud and gas cover. The range is between 447-477 degrees Celsius.

Find out more about our planet of the day here.

2 comments:

Rachael said...

I did one of my grade-school science projects on Venus. Thanks for the memory.

That S is a little smarty.

Francie said...

Sounds like he's a little too advanced for those questions! What a smarty pants! :)