How to Find Out the Time
“It took me up to twenty years to learn how to read an analog clock, which is still very difficult,” says Lifehacker reader Albert Peters, commenting on our post on basic life skills . The rest agreed. With the advent of digital clocks, it is becoming less and less practice for people to tell the time from an analog clock. We will help. There are two ways to read the watch: accurate and fast.
Know your hands
All hands on the clock move “clockwise” – top right, bottom left, counting from 1 to 12.
The shortest hand is the hour hand. The last number passed is the hour (for example, 5-something or 12-something).
The longer hand is the minute hand. To find out the current minute, multiply the last number passed by the arrow by 5 and add the number of marks passed by the arrow since this number passed. Thus, if the minute hand is three steps higher than 8, then the minutes will be (8 * 5) +3 or 43.
Sometimes there is a thin second hand. Works the same as the minute hand, but for seconds. Ignore it.
Know the stations on the clock
If you only need to know the approximate time, remember four main points on the clock: When the minute hand points straight up, it’s like a clock. When he points straight to the right, it is 15 minutes of the last hour. Straight down 30 minutes and straight left 45 minutes.
The four dots are 12, 3, 6, and 9. But pay more attention to the dots so you can still read the watch if it has Roman numerals or no numbers at all – as many elegant watches do.
And more and more often you will only see elegant decorative clocks as more and more everyday analog clocks are replaced by digital clocks that can be effectively controlled or programmed to update for daylight saving time.
Fortunately, this means that when you only have an analog clock, you probably need to know that while it’s not exactly that time. And for this you only need an hour hand: to what number is it close and how close is it? To be more accurate, what common part of the hour does the minute hand point to?
Find the phone number to clarify. After all, telephones know the real time. While analog clocks – and many digital clocks – need to be manually adjusted and are often one or two minutes behind real time, most phones work exactly right.