科学美国人60秒 SSS 2014-01-01_在线英语听力室

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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 aphelion¹, its furthest distance. Which would explain why summer seems to zip by except the seasons are (the) function of the tilt² of the Earth’s access/axis, not it's/its different distances from the Sun.

And the Earth rotated³ [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.

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1 aphelion
n.远日点；远核点
参考例句：
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。

2 tilt
v.(使)倾侧；(使)倾斜；n.倾侧；倾斜
参考例句：
She wore her hat at a tilt over her left eye.她歪戴着帽子遮住左眼。 The table is at a slight tilt.这张桌子没放平，有点儿歪.

3 rotated
（使某物）旋转[转动]( rotate的过去式和过去分词 )；（使某人或某物）轮流[按顺序循环]
参考例句：
To combat this tendency, Carlson rotated his top executives. 为了反对这种倾向，卡尔森轮换他的高级行政主管。 The drum is rotated at 20 revolutions per minute for 10 minutes. 圆筒以每分钟20转的速度转10分钟。

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科学美国人60秒 SSS 2014-01-01