Happy New Year! And don't feel bad about ____1____. After all, you've traveled far. And I'm not talking about the trip home from the party last night. According to NASA, just by being on the planet Earth in the last year, you’ve ____2____ about 584 million miles around the sun to get back where you were. At an average speed of about 67,000 miles per hour. Again, not talking about the drive home last night.
Of course, the trip was not a perfect circle. As Kepler showed, ____3____, with the sun at one of the two focal points. He also figured out the planet goes faster when it’s at perihelion, nearer the sun, than when it's at aphelion, its farthest distance.
Which would explain why summer seems to ____4____, except the seasons are a function of the tilt of the Earth’s axis, not its different distances from the sun. And the Earth rotated 365 and a quarter times during its ____5____ 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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