Time zone

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This article is about time zones in general. For a list of time zones by country, see List of time
zones by country. For more time zone lists, see Lists of time zones. For other uses, see Time
zone (disambiguation).

Time zones of the world

A time zone is an area which observes a uniform standard
time for legal, commercial and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries
between countries and their subdivisions instead of strictly following longitude, because it is
convenient for areas in frequent communication to keep the same time.
All time zones are defined as offsets from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), ranging
from UTC−12:00 to UTC+14:00. The offsets are usually a whole number of hours, but a few
zones are offset by an additional 30 or 45 minutes, such as in India, South Australia and Nepal.
Some areas of higher latitude use daylight saving time for about half of the year, typically by
adding one hour to local time during spring and summer.