why does the line seperating time zones not follow the meridian exactly?
549074
A meridian is an arbitrary line, it is straight and goes through anything in it's path.  Can you envision a world where time zones did that.  It is bad enough that a country can have multiple time zones but what about states.  Half of the state on one time and the other half on another time setting.  Now let's get really serious.  How about a city.  can you imagine having to cross a time zone to go to work or to go to the market.  City agencies would be snarled all the time.  And we could be as silly as having you home split with two clocks on the same wall displaying different times and both being correct.\n\nThe time zones are established to be a bit more user friendly than that.\n\nI hope that gives you a bit of the rational.
1173000
It should read 9:30 PST, or Pacific Standard Time.  The contiguous US has four time zones.  Pacific time is the west coast time; California, Oregon, etc.  \nYou can use this site to determine the corresponding time where you are.... (use Los Angeles for PST)\n\nhttp://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/
54341
Not sure I understand the question. Do you mean the international date line?
223500
>There are 24 longitudinal divisions of Earth's surface in which a standard time is kept, the primary division being that bisected by the Greenwich meridian. Each zone is 15° of longitude in width, with local variations, and observes a clock time one hour earlier than the zone immediately to the east.Under this scheme, local time is always close to mean solar time, while comparing the time in different places is a simple matter of adding or subtracting whole hours. However, the one hour separation is not universal and,the shapes of time zones can be quite irregular because they usually,but not always,follow the boundaries of states,countries or other administrative areas.Some states do have more than one time zone.
1025233
Greenwich Mean Time does not change. The world is divided into 24 time zones going east (+) and west (-) from GMT. When we go from EST to EDT we are effectively changing our time zone from R (-5 hours) to Q (-4 hours).
1073455
No, you've got it backwards, it flushes counter-clockwiswe above the equator, and clockwise below. Right on the equator should flush counter-clockwise as well.
437872
the standard meridian is important for india bcoz there is two hours difference between the eastern most and western most part of india.so inorder to maintain a common time through out india the central meridian 82.5 is selected as the standard meridian.the reason for the need of a common time n india is for the integrated running of railways,flights,many telecasts and for all these thing different places cant have different timings.
91114
Lines of latitude go around the earth from east to west and are all parallel to each other.  They tell pilots, sailors, etc. how far they are north or south of the equator and how far they are from the north or south pole.  The equator is sort of the main line of latitude.  \n\nLines of longitude go from north to south and each one passes through both the north and south pole, so they are not parallel to each other.  The main line of longitude is called the Prime Meridian and it passes through Greenwich, England.  That is also the line on the earth that is used to determine time zones.\n\nThink of a peeled grapefruit or an orange. The segments of the grapefruit are sort of like the lines of longitude.  But if you cut the grapefruit through the middle like you do if you eat it for breakfast the cut that you make is sort of like the equator, the main line of latitude.\n\nHope this helps.
139666
I send mine and the time stamp is PST (Pacific Standard Time). My friend, 50 miles west of me and actually living ON the Pacifc coastline has an EST (Eastern Standard Time) stamp on his. We are smack in the middle of the Pacific Time zone. And the actual times of day don't make sense either. Go figure, huh?
378072
International Date Line, irregular line drawn on the map of the Pacific Ocean, near, and in many places coincident with, the 180th meridian. It marks the place where navigators change their date by one day on a transpacific voyage. East of the line it is one day earlier than to the west.\n\nAny traveler circling the globe in a westward direction lengthens the day by 1 hour for every 15° of longitude traveled because the traveler is following the apparent motion of the sun; by the time he or she has traveled completely around the world, the traveler is one full day ahead of the people who have remained at the starting place of the trip. Similarly, going eastward, a traveler arrives a day behind.\n\nClose to the 180th meridian, nearly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a place chosen because of the virtual absence of land and of civilization in the region, navigators going westward add a day to their calendars (for example, the day after August 6 would be August 8), and navigators going eastward drop a day from their calendars (for example, the day after August 6 would be August 6) to correct for this gain or loss of time. The date line is curved eastward around Siberia, westward around the Aleutian Islands, and eastward around the Fiji Islands and New Zealand; the line is so curved to avoid crossing land.\n\n© 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
180149
The International Date Line is an imaginary north-south line (at the 180th meridian) in the Pacific Ocean at which the date changes. The east side of the IDL is a calendar day earlier than the west side. The actual IDL used is not a straight line, but zigzags around certain populated areas.\n\nThe Equator is an imaginary line, running east to west, that is the origin for latitude. It is drawn exactly half way between the northern and southern hemispheres, where latitude measures 0 degrees.\n\nThe Prime Meridian is the imaginary line, running from north to south, that is used as the origin for measuring longitude. It is an imaginary line drawn through all locations where longitude is 0 degrees.
672574
In 1878, Canadian Sir Sanford Fleming proposed the system of worldwide time zones that we use today. He recommended that the world be divided into twenty-four time zones, each spaced 15 degrees of longitude apart. Since the earth rotates once every 24 hours and there are 360 degrees of longitude, each hour the earth rotates one-twenty-fourth of a circle or 15 degrees of longitude. Sir Fleming's time zones were heralded as a brilliant solution to a chaotic problem worldwide.\n\nUnited States railroad companies began utilizing Fleming's standard time zones on November 18, 1883. In 1884 an International Prime Meridian Conference was held in Washington D.C. to standardize time and select the Prime Meridian. The conference selected the longitude of Greenwich, England as zero degrees longitude and established the 24 time zones based on the Prime Meridian. Although the time zones had been established, not all countries switched immediately. Though most U.S. states began to adhere to the Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern time zones by 1895, Congress didn't make the use of these time zones mandatory until the Standard Time Act of 1918.\n\nToday, many countries operate on variations of the time zones proposed by Sir Fleming. All of China (which should span five time zones) uses a single time zone - eight hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (known by the abbreviation UTC - based on the time zone running through Greenwich at 0 degrees longitude). Australia uses three time zones - its central time zone is a half-hour ahead of its designated time zone. Several countries in the Middle East and South Asia also utilize half-hour time zones.\n\nSince time zones are based on segments of longitude and lines of longitude narrow at the poles, scientists working at the North and South Poles simply use UTC time. Otherwise, Antarctica would be divided into 24 very thin time zones!\n\nThe time zones of the United States are standardized by Congress and although the lines were drawn to avoid populated areas, sometimes they've been moved to avoid complication. There are nine time zones in the U.S. and its territories, they include Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, Hawaii-Aleutian, Samoa, Wake Island, and Guam.\n\nWith the growth of the Internet and global communication and commerce, some have advocated a new worldwide time system.
384747
The day is being calculated in another server. Your time zone may be different. Try after some time
332870
Basically one must understand the Atlas.  It is based on the time.  If one looks at the lines drawn across the atlas, there is a line called Greenwich Meridian, where the time zone is zero.  East of that line falls Japan where the time is plus 12 and and west of that line falls Alaska where the time is minus 12.  Japan is the land where the Sun's rays fall at first during its rotation (from left to right) and therefore, Japan is called the land of the rising sun.
9157
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. Their difference is the equation of time. Mean solar time is the average over the course of a year of apparent solar time (sundial time). With the expansion of the railways and as telecommunications improved this became increasingly awkward because clocks in a given town would differ from those in any other by an amount corresponding to their difference in geographical longitude, which was generally not a convenient number. Forcing all localities to run their clocks in synchrony would solve this problem, but under such a scheme, in many places the time shown by clocks at sunrise and sunset would differ too markedly from the solar time values to which people are accustomed. As a compromise, a scheme was devised where the surface of the planet was divided into twenty four "time zones", each separated by 15° of longitude and offset by one hour from its neighbor. Under this scheme, local time is always close to mean solar time, while comparing the time in different places is a simple matter of adding or subtracting whole hours. 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.\n\nOriginally, time zones were aligned such that the Prime Meridian (longitude 0°) was the centre of its own time zone, with the mean solar time on that meridian (Greenwich Mean Time or GMT) defining its local time. As a result, all other time zones used GMT as the "base time", from which they were offset by a whole number of hours. However, as a mean solar time, GMT, or UT1 as it is also now known, is defined by the rotation of the Earth, which is not constant in rate. Initially, the rate of atomic clocks was annually changed or steered to closely match GMT, but effective 1 January 1972 the rate of atomic clocks became fixed, and time steps (leap seconds) replaced the rate changes. This new time system was called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Leap seconds are inserted to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1. In this way, local times continue to correspond approximately to mean solar time, while the effects of variations in Earth's rotation rate are confined to simple step changes that can be easily subtracted if a uniform time scale (TAI) is desired. With the implementation of UTC, nations began to use it in the definition of their time zones instead of GMT. As of 2005, most but not all nations have altered the definition of local time in this way (though many media outlets fail to make a distinction between GMT and UTC). Further change to the basis of time zones may occur if proposals to abandon leap seconds succeed.\n\nUTC 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). Similar circumstances apply in many places: see Daylight saving time.\n\nThe definition for time zones can be written in short form as UTC±n (or GMT±n), where n is the offset in hours.
1107632
There's Greenwich Mean Time, which was measured from the 0 degree meridian in Greenwich, UTC (Universal Time co-ordinate) which is measured from an atomic clock in france somewhere (UTC doesn't have summer time, GMT does) and there's standard time which works on the premise that 1 rotation of the earth is 24 hrs, so 360 degrees in 24 hrs = 15 degrees every hour, so every 15 degrees of longitude is 1 hr of time difference
509348
u might have heard abt latitudes. Sun light constantly falls on earth. as earth moves different past of earth receives light and this is what we term as day and night. Latitudes help in determining times and it takes 15mins for sun to pass from one latitide to another. In other words we have time zones ever heard of green whtch time zone. This way, time is calculated with respect to sunrise and sunset. \n\nThus its all depending on how sunlight reaches in ur region..!