Why Do We Tell Time in Hours and Minutes?

We use hours and minutes because they make time easier to understand. A day has 24 hours, which is like having a big pie cut into 24 slices, each slice is an hour. Each hour can be divided into 60 smaller pieces called minutes, so we know how much of the hour has passed.

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Examples

  1. A clock face helps you know how much time has passed during your favorite TV show.
  2. When it's 3:45 PM, you might have 15 minutes left before dinner time.
  3. If the minute hand moves from 12 to 6 on a clock, that means one hour has passed.

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Categories: Math · time· clocks· history of mathematics · Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.