Uranus revolves around the Sun once every 84 Earth years. Its average distance from the Sun is roughly 3 billion km (about 20 AU). The intensity of sunlight on Uranus is about 1/400 that on Earth. Its orbital elements were first calculated in 1783 by Pierre-Simon Laplace. With time, discrepancies began to appear between the predicted and observed orbits, and in 1841, John Couch Adams first proposed that the differences might be due to the gravitational tug of an unseen planet. In 1845, Urbain Le Verrier began his own independent research into Uranus's orbit. On September 23, 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle found a new planet, later called Neptune, at nearly the position predicted by Le Verrier.
The rotational period of the interior of Uranus is 17 hours, 14 minutes, clockwise (retrograde). As on all giant planets, its upper atmosphere experiences very strong winds in the direction of rotation. At some latitudes, such as about two-thirds of the way from the equator to the south pole, visible features of the atmosphere move much faster, making a full rotation in as little as 14 hours.
Notes
University
A university is a higher learning institution. The word "university" comes from the Latin "universitas magistrorum et scholarium", roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars". Students can go to university to get an academic degree. Unlike the schooling they have done before, the courses at university are specialised. A person studying biology at university has many courses about biology and fewer courses in other fields such as languages or history. To get a higher degree, people must do some research.
Not all subjects are offered at universities. Mainly, universities offer courses which are about knowledge. They usually do not offer courses in practical trades. In some cases such as law, where there are both knowledge and practical issues, the university does mainly the theoretical side of the subject. Practical qualifications are dome elsewhere.
The universities were born in Europe during the Middle Ages. The first institution of this type was the University of Bologna, which later became a model for other centres of education.
At first, the universities had formed themselves according to the model of the professional groups and like almost everything in the Middle Ages, they remained tied to the Catholic Church. At the beginning, they had worked to teach the so-called "seven liberal arts" (the "trivium" and the "quadrivium"):
That earliest division caused the present divisions between literary and scientific fields. From one point of view, the world's oldest university is Qarawiyyin university. However, teaching religion is not the definition used by most people. A university should in theory teach every subject.
The university is generally regarded as a formal institution that has its origin in the Medieval Christian tradition. European higher education took place for hundreds of years in cathedral schools or monastic schools ("scholae monasticae"). There, monks and nuns taught classes: evidence of these dates back to the 6th century.
The Universities of Paris and Oxford were founded by members of the church. Later universities were founded by kings.
In the early medieval period, most new universities were founded from pre-existing schools, usually when these schools became mainly sites of higher education. Pope Gregory VII promoted the concept of modern university as his 1079 Papal Decree. He ordered the establishment of cathedral schools, which eventually turned into the first European universities.
A university can include several campuses or different places where classes are taught by professors. In each campus there are several faculties and university schools (mainly for teaching), and also laboratories, departments and institutes of research. Many campuses also have housing for students in buildings called dormitories and structures like libraries, study rooms and gymnasiums for students that live there. Each school offers many courses that students take to earn a degree. The person with the highest right to control and to command in a university is the rector, who governs the university with the help of the party of vice-rectors and of other organs such as the social council and the governing body.
There is a group of famous universities called the Ivy League. They are:
Some other famous universities are:
Value
Value is how much something is worth. Often the best way to find the value of something is to use the price that it can be sold for. However Oscar Wilde wrote that 'people know the price of everything but the value of nothing'- in other words true value does not depend on money alone.
In math, a value is a number which is concrete, something everyone can agree upon. However people may disagree on the value of water, depending if you live in a desert or next to a river. Disagreements on the value of things can create fights between nations, political parties, religions, etc.
Volapük
Volapük is a constructed language created in 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer. Schleyer was a Catholic priest from Germany. He felt that God had told him in a dream to make an international language. Volapük conventions took place in 1884, 1887, and 1889. The aim was to help people from different cultures speak to each other.
Volapük became less popular after 1887 when Esperanto was published. Part of the reason was that Esperanto is easier to learn with a simpler grammar. There are believed to only be 20-30 Volapük speakers in the world today.
The vocabulary of Volapük is mostly English, with some words from German and French.
"Vol" and "pük" come from the English words "world" and "speech". The grammar is based on Indo-European languages.
An example of Volapük is the translation of the "Lord's prayer":
<poem>
</poem>
Vocabulary
A vocabulary is a list of words.
The vocabulary a person uses is all the words that person knows and uses. In general, a person who is five knows about 4,000 to 5,000 words. Adults who go to college may know 20,000 words. A hearing vocabulary and reading vocabulary are bigger than a speaking vocabulary or writing vocabulary, as people understand some words that they do not use.
The number of words in a language is more than the words listed in one dictionary. One dictionary may have a list of 500,000 (half a million) words. Another dictionary may have some other words that the other dictionary does not have. When you add all the words in those dictionaries, there are about 750,000 words in English. There may be more words than that.
You may think to yourself, ""If there are 750,000 words, how can we talk with only 3000 words?"" Because, we do not need to know all the words. You can say most things with around 3,000 words.
The most used words are short words. That is true in all languages. The 50 most common words in English have fewer than seven letters. Half of these words have fewer than four letters.
The vocabulary of a language is always changing. New words are made or words change their meaning. Words about computers, like "download" are new to the English language. The new word "bling" came from hip hop. Words like "cool" have developed new meanings.
Vegetable oil
Vegetable oils are triglyceride oils made from plants. They are used in food and for cooking. In past centuries they were much used as fuel in oil lamps. Some kinds of plant oils that people use are palm oil, maize, olive, peanut, rapeseed, soy, and sunflower.
Margarine is an artificial butter made from vegetable oil.
Verb
A verb is a kind of word (part of speech) that tells about an action or a state. It is the main part of a sentence: every sentence has a verb. In English, verbs are the only kind of word that changes to show past or present tense.