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How to Calculate Minutes on a Hundred-Second Clock

For thousands of years, we have divided our days into 24-hour segments. But there's another way to keep track of time, known as decimal time. Decimal time has been used by different cultures, including the French and the Chinese, at different points in history. Decimal time divides the day into 10 hours, with each hour consisting of 100 minutes and each minute consisting of 100 seconds. Some clocks depict these values, but in order to figure out the amount of minutes that have passed, you'll need to do some converting.

Instructions

- 1
  Note the middle two digits on the decimal clock. These represent the "minutes." A standard decimal clock reading looks something like this: 5:27:18, where "27" represents the minutes. The "5" represents the hour, and the "18" represents the seconds.
- 2
  Determine the amount of minutes that have passed by subtracting the earlier value from the later value. For instance, if, when you first looked at the decimal clock, it read 5:27:18, and then later it read 5:77:24, you know that approximately 50 decimal minutes have passed -- with the exception of a few extra seconds. This is because the middle values of readings -- the 27 and the 77 -- represent the minutes, and there is a difference of 50 between the two values.
- 3
  Divide the difference that you've found by five. Continuing our example, divide 50 by 5 to get a value of 10.
- 4
  Multiply this number by three to get the final conversion to standard minutes. Continuing the example, multiply 10 by 3 to get 30. Because there are 100 minutes in decimal time, half an hour is equal to 50 decimal minutes. There are 60 minutes in standard time, where half an hour is represented by a value of 30 minutes. You can see now that in the original example, half an hour of standard time has passed on the decimal clock.

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