Ann Hildebrandt, age 10, of Charleston, a., for her question:

Why are the days, weeks and months so mixed up?

Certain tidy people have plans for streamlining our sloppy calendar, A year of 364 days divides neatly into 52 weeks; The 52 weeks divide exactly into 13 months of four weeks each, Each year and month would begin with Sunday and end with Saturday, If you were born on January 2, your birthday. w uld always fall on a Monday, The switch to this calandar would cause d lot of up‑set. So the tidy people have a less extreme suggestion.

There are 3644 days in plan two, But the 52 weeks are divided into 12 irregular months. They are divided into equal quarter‑years of 13 weeks each.

Each year, and quarter year starts Sunday and ends on Saturday. There would be fewer changes in the switch‑over to this plan and no extra month to add,

Either plan one or plan two would save hours of accounting and other chores in the business world,

The real year, of course, is longer than 365 days. Our calendar keeps abreast of thins with 365 days in a year and an extra day in leap year, The

planners have taken care of that too. They suggest an extra day before every January 1. To keep the business records straight it would be a non‑working day, Letts call it World Play Day, Leap year day would be fitted in after the last day of June, also a non‑working day,

Our calendar was started long ago to record the passing of the days, the months and the years, A calendar day is from midnight to midnight. The year is from midwinter to midwinter. The months were meant to tally with the four phases of the moon; the weeks were roughly quarter months,

The only clock for recording this passing of time is in the skies. The sky‑watching to make our calendar was started thousands of years ago, A lot of it had to be guesswork. The calendar was improved many times to bring it in line with more accurate sky records,

Modern experts can figure the moving sky clock to the second. It takes 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 8.97 seconds for the earth to makes it yearly orbit around the sun. The moon goes around the earth once in 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes and 43 minutes and 11.5 seconds. The old earth spins on her axis slightly faster in June than in December. The average spin takes 24 hours, 3 minutes, 26.50 seconds.

The heavenly bodies care nothing for a neat calendar, fast try using those figures to work out weeks, months and years that fit exactly together, Those who made our sloppy calendar did not do so badly, after all6 Year by year it tallies with the clock in the sky almost perfectly. In 4000 years there would be only an error of one day. True, we could do with a neater calendars But the new plans also have an error of one day in 4000 years.