Many people wonder we have time zones. If there were not any time zones, midnight would be morning in some places and afternoon in others. Time zones allow the global community to have a similar human experience. There are twenty-four different time zones because it takes twenty-four hours for our planet to rotate. With this in mind, everyone that experiences noon has a similar experience as far as the amount and the intensity of the sun. This section of our website helps students get comfortable with working with time values across time zones.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) was created to provide a standard for all time zones to work off of. This was decided upon at the Washington Meridian Conference. Before that Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was the standard that was observed by most people. This time is observed and recorded at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. UTC is often mistaken for an actual times zone, which it is not. The world basically sets in clock to this standard. These worksheets explain how to convert times to a given location's local time using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) classifications. Students will also calculate the age of the presented data.