how many timezones is the United States divided into?
537691
Four on the continental USA.
436376
As defined by the Census Bureau, the Southern region of the United States includes 16 states, and is split into three smaller units: The South Atlantic States, which are Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia (plus the District of Columbia); the East South Central States of Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee; and the West South Central States of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
10279
You're in the eastern time zone. If you want to see for yourself go here:\n\nhttp://www.time.gov/index.html
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.
629015
Its not that the times are different in different countries, it has to do with time zones. There are 16 (I think) different time zones around the world, so that no matter where you are in the world, the time will be about the same to where the sun is.\nTo learn more try the link
326857
A little after noon. To find out the time in any American time zone, try the first link below.
347847
For the Eastern US Time Zone, Switzerland is 6:00 hours ahead
420939
A time zone is a region of the Earth that has adopted the same standard time, usually referred to as the local time. Most time zones are exactly one hour apart, and by convention compute their local time as an offest from Greenwich Mean Time.\n\nStandard time zones can be defined by geometrically subdividing the Earth's spheroid into 24 lunes (wedge-shaped sections), bordered by meridians each 15° of longitude apart. The local time in neighbouring zones is then exactly one hour different. However, political and geographical practicalities can result in irregularly-shaped zones that follow political boundaries or that change their time seasonally (as with daylight saving time), as well as being subject to occasional redefinition as political conditions change.\n\nThere are different definitions of time zone which generally fall into two meanings: a time zone can represent a region where the local time is some fixed offset from a global reference (usually UTC), or a time zone can represent a region throughout which the local time is always consistent even though the offset may fluctuate seasonally.\n\nGreenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established in 1675 as an aid to determine longitude at sea by mariners. The first time zone in the world was established by British railways on December 1, 1847 — with GMT hand-carried on chronometers. About August 23, 1852, time signals were first transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Even though 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made Britain's legal time until August 2, 1880. Some old clocks from this period have two minute hands — one for the local time, one for GMT [1]. This only applied to the island of Great Britain, and not to the island of Ireland.\n\nOn November 2, 1868, New Zealand (then a British colony) officially adopted a standard time to be observed throughout the colony, and was perhaps the first country to do so. It was based on the longitude 172° 30' East of Greenwich, that is 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of GMT. This standard was known as New Zealand Mean Time.\n\nTimekeeping on the American railroads in the mid nineteenth century was somewhat confused. Each railroad used its own standard time, usually based on the local time of its headquarters or most important terminus, and the railroad's train schedules were published using its own time. Some major railroad junctions served by several different railroads had a separate clock for each railroad, each showing a different time. The Pittsburgh main station used six different times! The confusion for travellers making a long journey involving several changes of train can be imagined
1047423
In the US it is 11:00AM est.
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.
1071449
It is the time zone covering the central-western states, near the rocky mountains.  It is two hours behind Eastern Time, so when it's Noon in New York, it's 10am in Denver.
133867
12:51 am mountain time zone
285581
I use the link below at work.  I work for an International company and need to know the time zones around the world.  The link below is helpful.
73397
Very good question.  Because of conventions.  A country has a certain time zone that geographically would correspond to its neighbor, for commercial reasons.  So they "adopt" a certain time zone, the one "next door".  Or one same region or country cannot have two time zones, so they unify it in one time zone and then the line is not straight.
728325
You are probably referring to UTC time (Coordinated Universal Time).  The offset for the central time zone would be UTC-5 during daylight savings time.
695236
Theoretical there should be 24 as there is 24 hours in a day and each time zone is 1 hour long. But there are countries that have their time zones set at half hourly intervals, such as India and Australia to name two. In actual fact there is 27 time zones in the world counting these half hourly ones.
40369
U.S. and World Population Clocks - POPClocks\nPopulation Clocks\nU.S. 297,846,028\nWorld 6,489,395,497\n00:09 GMT (EST+5) Jan 05, 2006 \nNote: The U.S. POPClock is consistent with Census 2000 data and the most recent national population estimates.