Q1.
Three friends read time from a clock. Who is right? Discuss the error and explain how one reads the clock correctly.
Answer
The three clocks and what each friend wrote.
The same clocks. Rani’s reading is the correct one every time.
| Raghu | Raghav | Rani | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12:04 | 12:20 | 04:00 | |
| 07:07 | 07:25 | 05:35 | |
| 03:07 | 03:35 | 07:15 |
Rani is right every time. The clocks show 4:00, 5:35 and 7:15.
| Raghu | Raghav | Rani | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12:04 | 12:20 | 04:00 | |
| 07:07 | 07:25 | 05:35 | |
| 03:07 | 03:35 | 07:15 |
Where the other two go wrong. Raghu and Raghav both look at the wrong hand. They read the long hand as the hour and the short hand as the minutes.
- Raghu then writes the small number just as it is. On the first clock the short hand is on 4, so he writes 04 minutes and gets 12:04.
- Raghav counts the same small number in fives. He gets 4 × 5 = 20 and writes 12:20.
How to read a clock correctly:
- Find the short thick hand. The number it has just passed is the hour.
- Find the long thin hand. Count in fives from 12 up to it to get the minutes.
- Write hour first, then minutes: 5:35, not 35:5.
| Clock | Short hand | Long hand | Correct time |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | on 4 | on 12, so 0 minutes | 4:00 |
| Second | just past 5 | on 7, so 7 × 5 = 35 minutes | 5:35 |
| Third | just past 7 | on 3, so 3 × 5 = 15 minutes | 7:15 |
Why it happens: The two hands do different jobs. The short hand crawls once round the face in 12 hours; the long hand races round in 1 hour. So the short hand must be read as the hour and the long hand as the minutes.
Tip: If the short hand is between two numbers, always take the smaller one. On the second clock it is between 5 and 6, so the hour is 5.