Question 153
MediumOriginal questionIt is easy to think of the Sun as something , but to an astronomer it is an ordinary star: a hot, glowing ball of gas like the stars we see at night. It only looks different because it is so much nearer. Even so, it is far away, about 150 million kilometres, which is roughly four hundred times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
The Sun is about a hundred times wider than the Earth, yet it is only an average size for a star. Astronomers have found stars a hundred times bigger than the Sun, and others ten times smaller.
It is also . The Sun is about 4.5 billion years old and is at present a type of star called a yellow dwarf. In another five billion years or so it will into a big, cooler star called a red giant. A few billion years after that, it will shrink into a white dwarf: a star about the size of the Earth, but far heavier.
None of this makes the Sun any less important to us. Its holds the whole solar system together, and life on Earth depends on its light and heat. An ordinary star, it turns out, is enough to make a planet a home.
The writer calls the Sun "middle-aged" to show that it is
Show the answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
The paragraph gives its age as about 4.5 billion years and says it will change again "in another five billion years or so".
That puts the Sun roughly in the middle of its life, just as a middle-aged person is halfway through theirs.
Worth noting
The word is borrowed from how we describe people. It is used here as a picture, not as a scientific term.
- Concept
- Understanding a word used as a comparison
- Typical timeTypical
- 35 s
- Your timeYours
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