Dear Children,

How are your school lives going on so far? I hope that your energy and the enthusiasm of learning new things accompany you every day!

I am here to tell you one important information about today-- Sunday March 14, 2010. It is the day that Daylight Saving Time starts. People advance clocks by one hour during the summer to have more daylight in the afternoon and less in the morning to save energy. Some countries use the term summer time to mean DST. Not every country observes DST. Taiwan used to implement DST but abandoned DST in 1976. DST has caused controversy since it began. What do you think about DST? I would love to hear your opinions!

If you have a huge learning appetite, here is more information for you!

Enjoy your reading!

 

Love,

Camilla

Daylight saving time

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Although not used by most of the world's people, daylight saving time is common in high latitudes.      DST observed      DST no longer observed      DST never observed

Taiwan (Greenwich Mean Time +8)

Taiwan implemented DST from 1945 to 1961, revoked DST from 1962 to 1973, reinstated DST from 1974 to 1975, and abandoned DST from 1976 onwards.

People's Republic of China

Main article: China Standard Time

The People's Republic of China experimented with DST from 1986, but abandoned DST from 1992 onwards. The PRC now uses one time zone (UTC+8) for the whole country.

     Areas that have DST     Areas that once had DST      Areas that never had DST

 

Origin of DST

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_Saving_Time

In this ancient water clock, a series of gears rotated a cylinder to display hour lengths appropriate for each day's date.

Although not punctual in the modern sense, ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern DST does, often dividing daylight into twelve equal hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was longer during summer.^[12] For example, Roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started by modern standards at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes.^[13] After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some Mount Athos monasteries^[14] and some Jewish ceremonies.^[15]

Benjamin Franklin suggested firing cannons at sunrise to waken Parisians.

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, author of the proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise", anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight.^[16] This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.^[17] Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.^[18]

G.V. Hudson invented modern DST, proposing it first in 1895.

Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, whose shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects, and made him aware of the value of after-hours daylight.^[2] In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift,^[19] and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch, New Zealand he followed up in an 1898 paper.^[20] Many publications incorrectly credit DST's invention to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett,^[21] who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.^[22] An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk.^[23] His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later.^[24]

As described in Politics below, Willett lobbied unsuccessfully for the proposal in the UK until his death in 1915. But, starting on 30 April 1916, Germany, its World War I allies, and their occupied zones were the first European nations to use Willett's invention as a way to conserve coal during wartime. Britain, most of its allies, and many European neutrals soon followed suit. Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year and the United States adopted it in 1918. Since then, the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals.^[25]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_around_the_world#China.2C_People.27s_Republic_of

Daylight saving time  (DST; also summer time in British English—see Terminology) is the practice of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn. Modern DST was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist. Many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.

The practice is controversial. Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but causes problems for farming, evening entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun. Traffic fatalities are reduced when there is extra afternoon daylight; its effect on health and crime is less clear. Although an early goal of DST was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity, modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly, and research about how DST currently affects energy use is limited and often contradictory. DST's occasional clock shifts present other challenges. They complicate timekeeping, and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Software can often adjust computer clocks automatically, but this can be limited and error-prone, particularly when DST rules change.