When I was a little girl my father would open my bedroom door at the crack of dawn on the weekend and holler, "What'cha sleeping for? Your're burning daylight! Let's go, let's go!" I knew that we were going hiking in the Sierra Nevada's and we needed to get going so we could hike 26 miles before it got dark... Who said that anyway? "You're burning daylight!" Obviously it's an idiom, but who said it first? Well, a tiny bit of research led me to find that it was John Wayne who said it in one of his movies, "The Cowboy". It literally means "time is a wastin", or "git a move on". What does this have to do with daylight trends? We have figured out that in summer we can stay outside longer than winter, when the sun sets earlier and rises later... The above graph tells us what we already know...the days of the year are on the bottom of the graph, and the hours of day are on the "y" axis on the left side of the graph. Can you see it? I know you can read this graph...the answer is....the trend of daylight in the Northern Hemisphere is shorter days during winter and longer days in the summer. The red line is sunrise, the blue line is sunset and the brown line is twilight. Yup! All that color and we already knew this, cuz we lived it!! Graphs show "trends" easily. The labeling on the x and y axis give us information that usually spans time, temperature, or space. If we were a company looking to take advantage of light because it contains lots of energy, and we are engineering a device that needs lots of energy, we would want to look at data that shows when the maximum hours of daylight are to maximize the use of our device. A perfect example is the solar car.... Would we test this car in Alaska during the winter? No! We will go where there is lots of sun, all the time! We would head to the Equator! Knowing the trends in daylight is helpful to scientists and engineers alike. When you live in the darkest places during the winter, many engineers invent ways to help people get as much light as possible because a lot of people get very depressed when there isn't a lot of sunlight in their life. Sunlight is one of the most important ingredients to our lives. Knowing that winter is coming many doctors encourage their patients to go outside as much as possible and be active. Even in the freezing cold, with the right clothing and shoes we can be outside for periods of time and enjoy the daylight. Trends in daylight is knowing how much sunlight is in the environment you live in. Old people love California and Florida where the days are long and the weather is warm and mild. Then there are others that love the cold and all the sports and activities that can take place in that little bit of daylight that occurs there. Trends: "a general direction of change".
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Mrs. TaylorI love science! Everything about the world is interesting and never boring. I love to study plants, animals, insects, and people. My favorite subjects are my students who are the most unique organisms on the planet! Categories |