How long from then to now?
Carry the minute hand round the dial. The hour hand travels with it the whole way, and as the minutes pass twelve you can see the hour being carried rather than being told to carry it.
30 min 3:45 → 4:15
- In minutes
- 30
- Past an o'clock
- once
Any time from 12:00 to 11:59.
Drag the minute hand round the dial. The hour hand is not draggable — on a real clock it is driven, and that is the point.
Ready to try some? Elapsed time worksheets
Where it usually goes wrong
Times get subtracted as if they were decimals: 4:15 − 3:45 comes out as 0.70, or as “70 minutes”, because an hour is being treated as a hundred of something. The other half is the hour hand — it is often drawn sitting on a number and then jumping. It travels the whole time, and where it sits is what tells you the hour has not finished yet.
Try this
- Drag from 3:45 to 4:15 and watch the hour hand carry itself across the 4.
- Read the same interval on the flat strip underneath. Thirty minutes, with the o'clock you crossed marked on it.
- Try an interval that crosses two o'clocks. Counting to the next hour and on from there is what the strip is showing you.
Where this goes next
Timetables, cooking, and any calculation in units of sixty run on this, and the calculator will not help with any of them.