Next time you have to wait for a train, a meeting or have any other reason for a sixty-minute delay, you might like to think what else is going on in the world. In just one hour, quite a lot happens.

Starting across the pond, the Americans drink ten thousand pots of coffee, and that's just in 7-Eleven stores. The supermarket chain sells more freshly brewed coffee than anything else, even more than bread. Inhabitants of that country also use four million plastic bottles, and two and a half million of them they throw away. You know, I'm sure somebody is missing a recycling opportunity and a chance to get rich. They also do quite a lot of online shopping. After an hour another one hundred Barbie dolls have been sold on the auction site ebay.com and fifty-four radio-control toys change hands too.

It's not such a good hour for the world's plants and animals, as three species become extinct. This number has gone up since the days I was at school – it used to be two a day. They aren't the only ones who meet their end. Thirty-five people are killed in armed conflict (in other words war) and more than one hundred are killed on the world's roads, with drivers injuring between two to three thousand as well. Have you ever wondered why more political protesters are concerned about those thirty-five than the hundred? I'm trying to think of the last time I heard a protest song about bad drivers but I don't remember any.

The earth gets a bit heavier and the sun loses a little weight. In a lifetime nobody is going to notice the difference. A tonne of dust from micrometeorites lands on our planet every hour. You can see where some of it comes from on a clear night. Look up at the sky and you will see a fast-moving point of light every few minutes. That is a large piece of rock burning up in our atmosphere. What's left at the end comes down to the surface of our world (usually the ocean). The sun throws out a billion tonnes of gas into space in the same time. It's got a lot more where that came from so it will stay around for a long time to come. Interestingly, it does not get smaller as a result. In fact, it gets slightly larger. It's all to do with gravity.

Anyway, I must go now. I'm having problems with Windows on my PC and I have to reinstall the entire operating system. That'll just take an hour.

Glossary

across the pond = what British people sometimes call America

an inhabitant mieszkaniec

dust pył

the surface powierzchnia

All except one of these anagrams (words with the letters mixed up) is a word describing a unit of time. What are they and which one is the odd one out?

ceedad

scoden

thonm

thilg-reay

norgthift

tucreny

KEY

decade

second

month

light-year

fortnight

century

The odd one out is 'light-year' because it is a unit of distance.

Just a thought…

How many places can you think of that are an hour's walking distance from where you live? What about an hour's drive?

What sort of person buys a Barbie doll on an internet auction site?

How do you think scientists calculated the weight of meteorite dust that lands on the earth? What about the weight of gas that comes out of the sun?

Did you know?

If you took all the energy from all the sunlight that hits the earth in one hour, you would have all the energy everyone in the world uses in two years. Unfortunately, we don't have the technology to make this much use of it.

Any film that is less than an hour long is called 'a short'. If it is longer than an hour, it is called 'a feature film'.

During the French Revolution, the idea of metric time was introduced. In this system there were ten 'hours' in the day. Other metric time units have been invented but they have never become popular.

Warunki użytkowania | Kontakt