Mondo Knows Facts
Nepal's clock runs 45 minutes off the hour
Its offset of five hours and 45 minutes is one of the oddest in the world Nepal set its own time in 1986 to mark the country as distinct from India, which sits half an hour behind on standard offsets. The chosen figure was meant to sit close to solar noon at Kathmandu. Only a handful of places use quarter-hour offsets. It sits in Mondo's world geography collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Coordinated Universal Time replaced Greenwich Mean TimeThe new standard relies on atomic clocks rather than the rotation of the EarthThe 24-hour day comes from Earth's rotationThe division into 24 hours is ancient, but the length of the day is not perfectly constantTime zones follow politics more than the SunSeveral countries use offsets that sit far from their solar time, and some use half-hour stepsChina keeps one clock across five time zonesOfficial time in Beijing applies from the eastern coast to Xinjiang, nearly 5,000 kilometres westThe International Date Line is not a straight lineIt zigzags around countries so that no single state has to keep two calendar datesMechanical clocks began striking in medieval towersAn escapement regulated falling weights and let towns keep time through the night
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Tags: time-zones, nepal, clocks
Nepal's clock runs 45 minutes off the hour: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Its offset of five hours and 45 minutes is one of the oddest in the world. The figure is taken from CIA World Factbook, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a world geography fact?
- Yes. It sits on the World Geography shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.