Leap Day Trivia

Seeing as this is Leap Day, February 29, here are a few questions regarding the extra day of the quadrennial cycle, and their answers. See if you can get them right.

1. Why is there an extra day every four years?

2. Who instituted the extra day?

3. What was the first leap year?

4. True or false - All end-of-century years are leap years.

5. For added credit, discuss whether or not it was wise to add the extra day to February instead of, say, June.

Answers

1. A solar year is 365 days and six hours. After four years, those extra hours add up to one day, which is counted as February 29.

2. Julius Caesar started the practice.

3. 45 B.C., or the Roman year 709. (The Christian calendar made the Roman year 754 A.D. 1; because there was no year zero, 1 B.C. would have had to be the leap year before A.D. 4, hence leap years before the common era would be odd-numbered.)

4. False. Owing to a quirk in the calendar that makes it a few minutes longer than the actual solar year (it's too complicated to explain here in detail), only end-of-century years divisible by 400 - 1600, 2000 - are leap years, not 1700, 1800 ,or 1900.

5. Giving the extra day to February was dumb. Why add it to February, a month people can't wait for to end? Why not put it at the end of June, when the period of sunlight in a day is at its longest? What was Caesar thinking? :-)