Time zone


 
 
Time zone

::Time Zone is also a historical computer game.

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::There is also an Australian franchise of video arcades called Timezone.

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Time zones are areas of the Earth that have adopted the same standard time, usually referred to as the local time. Formerly, people used local solar time (originally apparent and then mean solar time), resulting in time differing slightly from town to town. With the expansion of the railways and as telecommunications improved this became increasingly awkward. Time zones partially rectified the problem by setting the clocks of a region to the same mean solar time. Time zones are generally centered on meridians of a longitude, that is a multiple of 15? (360?/24 hours), thus making neighboring time zones one hour apart. However, the one hour separation is not universal and, as the map below shows, the shapes of time zones can be quite irregular because they usually follow the boundaries of states, countries or other administrative areas.

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All time zones are defined relative to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The reference point for Time Zones is the Prime Meridian (longitude 0?) which passes through the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Greenwich, London, United Kingdom http://greenwichmeantime.com/. For this reason the term Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is still often used (by the BBC, for example, amongst others) to denote the "base time" to which all other time zones are relative. UTC is, nevertheless, the official term for today's atomically measured time as distinct from time determined by astronomical observation as formerly carried out at Greenwich.

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GMT (UTC) is, incidentally, local time at Greenwich itself only between 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday in October and 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday in March. For the remainder of the year local time is UTC + 1, known in the UK as British Summer Time (BST).

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The time for a location is given relative to UTC. Some examples:

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~ Table of Content ~

Introduction
History
Trivia
List of time zones and contained areas
See also
References
External links
 
FR: Fuseau horaire


 

~ Related Subjects ~

Longitude (2) - Computer game (2) - Time Zone (2) - London (1) - United Kingdom (1) - Greenwich (1) - Prime Meridian (1) - Royal Greenwich Observatory (1) - Greenwich Mean Time (1) - British Summer Time (1) - Sidereal time (1) - Calculating local time (1) - GMT (1) - BBC (1) - UK (1) -
 

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