🇺🇸 🕐 **Poll: Younger Americans have a harder time reading clocks**
"_95% of Americans 65 or older say they can instantly tell the time from the hour and minute hands, while only 43% of adults under 30 can._"
🔗 https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/52878-younger-americans-hard-time-reading-clocks.
@bodhipaksa I prefer the 'old way' but that is probably due to habit rather than anything else.
@bodhipaksa @bibliolater I can read an analog clock, but always hated when my mom said it was quarter past, etc. Granted, I'm in my 30s and got a mix of digital and analog growing up. There's just less math involved when I get firm numbers.
@benetnasch @bibliolater I'm in my early sixties and when I was very young the only place I can think of that would display the time digitally would be a train station. If then! Digital watches only became affordable when I was in my teens.
So for me there's no math involved. "Twenty to seven" simply registers as a time. I don't need to mentally convert it into a different format.
And we only had two channels on the TV. And they were both black and white. I'm old, dammit!
Because with an analog clock you tend to do rounding ("It's just after twenty to five") exact digital times ("It's 4:42") tend to strike me as being overly precise. I assume that's not the case with people who grew up with the time being primarily digital.
@bodhipaksa I've got math dyslexia, so I had to really think about that first example. I can't remember how I learned to read clocks or if it was something I learned on my own, but I always translated it into numbers for my own sake.
@bibliolater Not surprised by this. I noticed years ago, when I was teaching grade nines, that they had trouble with a.m. and p.m., and time zones. The times, they are a changing.
@JPK_elmediat They certainly are, time waits for none.
@bibliolater I always get a frustrated "huh?" from my 17-year-old son when I tell him it's "quarter past" something or "twenty-five to" something. He wants it digital style: "something fifteen" or "something thirty-five." He finds my way of saying the time archaic. I think he can read an analog clock well enough. He just reads it in a different way from me.