French flag with a clock on top of a building
Seeing as Russia is the largest country in the world by land area, you may suppose it also contains the most time zones. And while it does have a lot (11, to be precise), it actually has fewer than France, which contains 12 time zones. France’s main landmass, France métropolitaine, keeps Central European Time, while its many dependencies observe 11 others. Those other regions include French Polynesia (Tahiti Time), Martinique (Atlantic Standard Time), and Mayotte (Eastern Africa Time), to name just a few, and when Saint-Pierre and Miquelon observes daylight saving time, the total number of time zones goes up to 13.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factBefore official time zones were established by the railroads, keeping track of time was a ramshackle, decentralized affair that occasionally resulted in trains arriving in their destination earlier than they’d departed.
Russia might technically be more impressive in this regard, however, as 10 of its 11 time zones are contiguous; the only exception is Kaliningrad, which is situated between Poland and Lithuania. The United States has nine official time zones, four of which are contiguous — the rest are kept by the likes of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Numbers Don't Lie
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The two U.S. states that don’t observe daylight saving time are ______.
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The two U.S. states that don’t observe daylight saving time are Arizona and Hawaii.
China has only one time zone.
As the world’s third-largest country by area and second-largest by population (having recently been surpassed in the latter category by India), China could reasonably be expected to have many time zones. So you may be surprised to learn it observes only one, Beijing Time, which was implemented by the Communist Party in 1949 in the name of national unity. Reducing the number of time zones from five to one means that residents of the western city Ürümqi now keep the same time as those in Shanghai, despite being more than 2,000 miles apart. This has resulted in any number of oddities and logistical issues, including midnight sunsets and confusing business hours.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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