--- title: Olympiad: timelines, centuries and which came first ★★★ — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Olympiad: timelines, centuries and which came first ★★★», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Grandad Ray in Leeds pegs a washing line across the garden: «Right, our kid, every metre is a thousand years» (our --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / Olympiad: timelines, centuries and whi… # Olympiad: timelines, centuries and which came first ★★★ Lesson 85 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 21 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/0/) — Grandad Ray in Leeds pegs a washing line across the garden: «Right, our kid, every metre is a thousand years» (our kid means little brother or sister in the North of England). - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/1/) — The pyramids hang near the far end, the Romans in the middle, and the last few metres are crowded with trains, planes and phones. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/2/) — Which-came-first puzzles trick the eye. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/3/) — Cleopatra lived about 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid was built, but only about 2,000 years before the Moon landing, so she is nearer to us than to the pyramid builders. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/4/) — BC years count down towards year 1, so the bigger BC number is the earlier year: 753 BC comes before 44 BC. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/5/) — And there is no year 0: 1 BC is followed straight by AD 1. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/6/) — A century is a hundred years, and its name is one more than its hundreds: 1066 is in the 11th century, 1492 in the 15th, 2026 in the 21st. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/7/) — The trap is a round year: 1900 still closes the 19th century, just as 100 is the last number of your first hundred. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/8/) — Between two AD years, subtract. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/9/) — Between a BC year and an AD year, add the two numbers and take away one, because there is no year 0. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/11/) — The Great Pyramid of Giza was built about 2560 BC, Cleopatra died in 30 BC and people landed on the Moon in 1969, so Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/12/) — Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic until about 4,000 years ago, so a few mammoths were still alive after the Great Pyramid was built. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/13/) — BC years count backwards towards year 1: Rome's legendary founding in 753 BC came 709 years before Julius Caesar was killed in 44 BC. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/14/) — There is no year 0: 1 BC is followed by AD 1, so from 10 BC to AD 10 is 19 years, not 20. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/15/) — A century is 100 years: the 1st century is the years 1 to 100, the 11th century is 1001 to 1100, the 19th century is 1801 to 1900, and the 21st century began on 1 January 2001. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/16/) — A decade is ten years: «the 1960s» means 1960 to 1969, the decade of Gagarin's flight in 1961 and the Moon landing in 1969. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/17/) — Dates from the course: the first Olympic Games 776 BC, the end of the western Roman Empire AD 476, the Viking raid on Lindisfarne 793, Volodymyr's baptism of Kyiv 988, Hastings 1066, Magna Carta 1215, the Mongols take Kyiv 1240, Columbus 1492. - [20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/20/) — To put dates in order, take the BC dates first, biggest number first, then the AD dates, smallest number first. - [21](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/21/) — The First World War touched five calendar years, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1918, but it lasted a little over four years, from summer 1914 to November 1918. - [22](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/22/) — A person who turns 100 in 2026 was born in 1926, so they could remember the Second World War but not the First. - [23](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/85-olympiad-timelines-centuries-and-which-came-first/23/) — At about 25 years per generation, 1,000 years is about 40 generations of parents and children. - ← previous: [Gaols, magistrates and old punishments: from the stocks to the Children Act of 1908](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/84-gaols-magistrates-and-old-punishments-from-the-stocks-to-the-children-act-of-1908/) - next →: [Olympiad: cause and effect chains ★★★](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/86-olympiad-cause-and-effect-chains/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)