[cal_i18n_meeting_tool]
1. Set your timezone (usually the capital city of your country or the biggest city in your region if it’s a multi-timezone country).
2. Set your friend’s timezone.
3. Set the date and time of the meeting in your timezone (the final dashes in the time are for PM or AM)
4. ‘Click here’ button
You can copy the link and share it with your friend, and he can see exactly what you’re seeing now. He can make changes and send a link back to you if he wants to.
[cal_mys_tool]
Return to Journalist’s Resources menu
This tool is for people who want to see how their available hours line up with the availability of a friend somewhere else in the world (a different time zone). There’s a video below to show how to use it, but you can also just read the following 4 steps.
Step 1: Select your timezone (usually this will be listed by the capital city of your country or the largest city of your timezone region. Once you find it, it will be easy to access it in the future)
Step 2: Select your friend’s timezone the same way
Step 3: Click between the schedules to highlight your hours of availability. You can do your friend’s hours as well, but probably you won’t want to.
Optional step: Type some text as a message or reminder to your friend
Step 4: Click ‘Generate Link’ at the bottom of the tool
It creates a link. If you share this link, whoever clicks it will see exactly what you are seeing now. Your friend can then fill in his hours or add a note, make a new link and send it back to you.
[cal_svg_map location=”colombia”]
[cal_svg_map location=”africa”]
The youngest country in the world is (the Republic of) South Sudan, which became a nation on July 9, 2011–the 54th country in Africa–after voting to separate from the northern part of Sudan after a long war which ended in a peace agreement in 2005, after which an autonomous government was formed in South Sudan. South Sudan was at peace until December 15, 2013 when a civil war broke out along the tribal lines of the two largest tribes of the country (and involving many other smaller tribes).
The oldest modern state in Africa is Ethiopia, the only country to resist the Scramble for Africa. After resisting an Egyptian invasion a generation before, in 1896 Ethiopia resisted an Italian invasion and began to be recognized as a state by European powers. We are talking here just about modern statehood, of course, as Ethiopia, Egypt, Libya, and many other regional civilizations date back much earlier than most European civilizations, as do civilizations in Sudan such as the Kingdom of Kush (although this was more northern Sudan), Meroë and Nubia.
[cal_svg_map location=”europe”]
Tap or click the country to show its name.
What is the furthest eastern country counted as being part of Europe?
[cal_eftg_flag_game]
Tap/click the question above to see the answer. Tap it again for the next question.
[cal_eftg_regsub]
Tap/click the question above to see the answer. Tap it again for the next question.
A more common term for ‘Middle Africa’ is ‘Central Africa.’
[cal_eftg_tz]
Tap/click the question above to see the answer. Tap it again for the next question.
How many time zones does Europe span? The technical answer is seven, because of the Azores and the European part (west of the Ural River) of Kazakhstan, if it is included. However, if we start in the UK (UTC and UTC+1 in summer, as all EU countries do Daylight Savings) or Iceland (UTC all the time) and continue east to Armenia and Georgia (UTC+4) it’s just four time zones.
Africa also has four time zones if we’re talking just about the continent (six time zones if we include Cape Verde on the west and Mauritius and Seychelles on the east). The same four as Europe.
The U.S. spans four time zones (five counting Alaska). Canada spans five (the same four as the main U.S. ones plus a fifth on Canada’s far eastern Maritime region.
Greenwich Mean Time is based on the mean solar time in the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. Greenwich Mean Time is still the name of a time zone (Western Europe), but just that time zone. That time zone and all others are defined offsets of Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which was originally called “railway time” and has replaced referring to all time zones in terms of an older usage of GMT. In other words, we use UTC. We only use GMT for a single time zone in UTC. That said, you’ll often see people just use “GMT,” including unfortunately our coder for some of our journalist tools (we’ll fix that when we have time).
Ideally, each time zone would be about 15 degrees of longitude, a 24-hour division of the globe. But some countries opted for a single timezone, although they span much more than 15 degrees longitude, such as China and India. Other countries use half- or quarter-hour deviations. It’s not a perfect system, but rather a decision taken by each country. Spain, Argentina and Chile chose hour-based offsets, but not necessarily those that you’d guess based on their location. Russia removed two of it’s original 11 time zones in 2010 but reinstated them in 2014.
[cal_govt_head_rev]
We also have a game that does this in reverse, where the game gives you the country and government position, and you guess the name.
[cal_govt_head]
We also have a game that does this in reverse, where the game gives you the person’s name and you guess their government position and country.
[cal_multiple_timezone total=”6″]
Return to Journalist’s Resources menu
After you click the ‘Generate link’ button, paste the link into your browser and you’ll see your clocks ticking away. If you then bookmark the page, you can easily check the same display later.
NOTE: To find a timezone, type the name of the capital city of the country, or the largest city in your region of the country. For example, if you’re in San Francisco, type “Los_Angeles” (use underscores for spaces). If you want Cali, Colombia, type “Bogota.”
(Abidjan is the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire and is the same timezone as London except in summer, because London does daylight savings. Abidjan is more stable as a reference point.)
To play a Time Zones Game and practice your time zones, click here.
If you don’t know where Côte d’Ivoire is, and want to familiarize yourself with African countries, click here.