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Time Zone

Time Zone

A North-South strip along the surface of the Earth which uses the same time standard, where notionally at 12 noon the sun is at its highest point in the sky.

The Earth is divided into 24 time zones and within each time zone the same time standard is used (i.e. all the clocks in a given time zone should agree). Each time zone is roughly 15 degrees wide, but there are some variations because time zones are often bounded by country or administrative borders and it is often easier to follow these borders than the strict 15 degree boundary.

Time zones are defined by the number of hours difference from UTC:

UTC Offset	Abbreviation	Full Name	Used Where
UTC - 12			Eniwetok, Kwajalein
UTC - 11			Midway Island, Somoa
UTC - 10		Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time	Hawaii
UTC - 9	AKST	Alaska Standard Time	Alaska
UTC - 8	AKDT	Alaska Daylight Time	Alaska
UTC - 8	PST	Pacific Standard Time	West coast of America and Canada
UTC - 7			Arizona
UTC - 7		Mountain Time	America and Canada
UTC - 6			Central America, Mexico City
UTC - 6	CST	Central Standard Time	America and Canada
UTC - 5			Bogota, Lima, Quito, East Indiana
UTC - 5	EST	Eastern Standard Time	East coast of America and Canada
UTC - 4		Atlantic Time	Canada
UTC - 4			Caracas, La Paz, Santiago
UTC - 3			Newfoundland, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Georgetown, Greenland
UTC - 2			Mid-Atlantic
UTC -1			Azores, Cape Verde Islands
UTC	UTC	Coordinated Universal Time	London
UTC	GMT	Greenwich Meridian Time	London
UTC			London, Casablanca, Monrovia
UTC + 1	BST	British Summer Time	London
UTC + 1			Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna, Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague, Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris, Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofija, Vilnius, Warsaw, Zagreb, West Central Africa
UTC + 2			Athens, Istanbul, Minsk, Bucharest, Cairo, Harare, Pretoria, Helsinki, Riga, Tallinn, Jerusalem
UTC + 3			Baghdad, Kuwait, Riyadh, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Nairobi
UTC + 4			Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Baku, Tbilisi, Yerevan
UTC + 5			Ekaterinburg, Islamabad, Karachi, Tashkent
UTC + 6			Almaty, Novosibirsk, Astana, Dhaka
UTC + 7			Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta, Krasnoyarsk
UTC + 8			Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi, Irkutsk, Ulaan Bataar, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Perth, Taipei
UTC + 9			Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo, Seoul, Yakutsk
UTC + 10			Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Guam, Port Moresby, Hobart, Vladivostok
UTC + 11			Magadan, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia
UTC + 12			Auckland, Wellington, Fiji, Kamchatka, Marshall Islands
UTC + 13			Muku'alofa

As a further complication some countries observe daylight saving, which means that their local time is adjusted by one or two hours at certain times of the year to make best use of the available daylight.

Relevant links:

www.fact-index.com/t/ti/time_zone.html
www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc - online time zone converter for converting from one time zone to another.
http://everything.explained.at/time_zone - Time zone explained.

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