Time Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz questions with answers about time.

Time Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is time?
A: Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.

Time is often referred to as a fourth what?
A: Dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.

Business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into what?
A: Into their respective measuring systems.

Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and technologists, and was a prime motivation in what?
A: Navigation and astronomy.

Generally speaking, methods of temporal measurement, or chronometry, take what two distinct forms?
A: The calendar, a mathematical tool for organizing intervals of time, and the clock, a physical mechanism that counts the passage of time.

In day-to-day life, the clock is consulted for periods less than what?
A: A day whereas the calendar is consulted for periods longer than a day.

Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as what?
A: "what a clock reads".

Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and what?
A: The International System of Quantities.

Time is used to define other quantities, such as what?
A: Velocity.

Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for what?
A: Units of time.

Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a what?
A: A heart.

Currently, the international unit of time, the second, is defined by measuring what?
A: The electronic transition frequency of caesium atoms.

Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value ("time is money") as well as personal value, due to what?
A: An awareness of the limited time in each day and in human life spans.

Increasingly, personal electronic devices display what?
A: Both calendars and clocks simultaneously.

Artifacts from the Paleolithic suggest that the moon was used to reckon time as early as how long ago?
A: 6,000 years ago.

Lunar calendars were among the first to appear, with years of how many months?
A: Either 12 or 13 lunar months (either 354 or 384 days).

The numbers twelve and thirteen came to feature prominently in many cultures, at least partly due to this relationship of what?
A: Months to years.

Where did other early forms of calendars originate?
A: In Mesoamerica, particularly in ancient Mayan civilization.

These calendars were religiously and astronomically based, with how many months in a year?
A: 18.

How many days in a month?
A: 20 days in a month.

The reforms of Julius Caesar in 45 BC put the Roman world on a what?
A: A solar calendar.

This Julian calendar was faulty in that its intercalation still allowed the astronomical solstices and equinoxes to advance against it by about how much?
A: 11 minutes per year.

When did Pope Gregory XIII introduce a correction?
A: In 1582.

The Gregorian calendar was only slowly adopted by different nations over a period of centuries, but it is now what?
A: It is by far the most commonly used calendar around the world.

During the French Revolution, a new clock and calendar were invented in attempt to do what?
A: To de-Christianize time and create a more rational system in order to replace the Gregorian calendar.

A large variety of devices have been invented to do what?
A: To measure time.

The study of these devices is called what?
A: Horology.

An Egyptian device that dates to c.

1500 BC, similar in shape to a bent T-square, measured what?
A: The passage of time from the shadow cast by its crossbar on a nonlinear rule.

The T was oriented which direction in the mornings?
A: Eastward.

At noon why was the device turned around?
A: So that it could cast its shadow in the evening direction.

The idea to separate the day into smaller parts is credited to whom?
A: The Egyptians because of their sundials, which operated on a duodecimal system.

The importance of the number 12 is due to what?
A: The number of lunar cycles in a year and the number of stars used to count the passage of night.

What was the most precise timekeeping device of the ancient world?
A: It was the water clock, or clepsydra, one of which was found in the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep I.

They could be used to measure the hours even at night, but required what?
A: Manual upkeep to replenish the flow of water.

The Ancient Greeks and the people from Chaldea (southeastern Mesopotamia) regularly maintained timekeeping records as an essential part of what?
A: Their astronomical observations.

Who in particular made improvements on the use of water clocks up to the middle Ages?
A: Arab inventors and engineers.

In the 11th century, Chinese inventors and engineers invented the first what?
A: Mechanical clocks driven by an escapement mechanism.

The hourglass uses the flow of what to measure the flow of time?
A: Sand.

Ferdinand Magellan used how many hour glasses on each ship for his circumnavigation of the globe in 1522?
A: 18.

Where are incense sticks and candles commonly used to measure time?
A: In temples and churches across the globe.