Chatham Islands* — Page 414, Lesson 371

We’re looking at the second half of a world time-zone table. This is the kind of reference you’ll use constantly in flight planning, so let’s make sure you can read it properly. The table gives, for each country or territory, the number of hours that its standard time is slow on UTC. Remember, “slow on UTC” means the local time is behind UTC — so if a place shows 05, local time is UTC minus 5 hours. A few entries have a half-hour, like 05 30, meaning UTC minus 5 hours 30 minutes. Now, the asterisk. You’ll see an asterisk next to many country names — for example, China, Lebanon, Libya, Spain, New Zealand. The note at the bottom says: “Summer time may be kept in these countries.” So the figure in the table is the standard* time; during summer, those places may shift forward by an hour. You must check the current season when you plan. There are also numbered footnotes. Footnote 1 applies to the Marshall Islands: except the islands of Kwajalein and Eniwetok, which keep a time 24 hours slow on that of the rest of the islands. Footnote 2 applies to the USSR: the boundaries between the zones are irregular, and the listed towns are in each zone. Footnote 3 says “Including West Berlin.” Footnote 4 applies to the Chatham Islands: except Kiritimati Island and the Phoenix Islands, which keep 10h and 11h slow on UT. Let me walk you through some specific entries so you see how to read them. Chatham Islands — 12, with footnote 4. So standard time is UTC minus 12 hours, but Kiritimati and Phoenix Islands are exceptions at 10 and 11 hours slow. Laccadive Islands — 05 30. That’s UTC minus 5 hours 30 minutes. China — 08, with an asterisk, so summer time may apply. Laos — 07. Christmas Island, Indian Ocean — 07. Cocos Keeling Islands — 06 30. Now the USSR entry is special. It’s listed as “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” with an asterisk and footnote 2. The table then breaks it into ten zones, each with a time and example towns. Zone 1: Amderma, Arkhangelsk, Kiev, Leningrad, Moscow, Odessa — 03. Zone 2: Baku, Tbilsi, Volgograd — 04. Zone 3: Ashkabad, Novvy Port, Sverdlovsk — 05. Zone 4: Alma-Ata, Omsk, Tashkent — 06. Zone 5: Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk — 07. Zone 6: Irkutsk — 08. Zone 7: Tiksi, Yakutsk — 09. Zone 8: Khabarovsk, Okhotsk, Vladivostok — 10. Zone 9: Magadan, Sakhalin I — 11. Zone 10: Anadyr, Petropavlovsk — 12. So the USSR spans from UTC minus 3 to UTC minus 12, depending on which zone you’re in. That’s why the footnote warns you the boundaries are irregular — you can’t assume a straight line; you must know which town or zone applies. Let me also highlight a few others so you get the pattern. Nepal — 05 45, a 45-minute offset. Norfolk Island — 11 30. Tonga — 13, which is ahead of UTC, so it’s 13 hours slow on UTC meaning UTC minus 13. Pakistan — 05. Papua New Guinea — 10. Philippines — 08. Poland — 01, with an asterisk. Qatar — 03. Romania — 02, with an asterisk. Saudi Arabia — 03. Seychelles — 04. Singapore — 08. Solomon Islands — 11. Somalia — 03. South Africa — 02. Sri Lanka — 05 30. Sudan — 02. Sweden — 01, with an asterisk. Switzerland — 01, with an asterisk. Syria — 02, with an asterisk. Taiwan — 08, with an asterisk. Tanzania — 03. Thailand — 07. Tunisia — 01, with an asterisk. Turkey — 02, with an asterisk. Tuvalu — 12. Uganda — 03. United Arab Emirates — 04. Vanuatu — 11, with an asterisk. Vietnam — 07. Yemen — 03. Yugoslavia — 01, with an asterisk. Zaire — split into two: Kinshasa and Mbandaka at 01, and Haut-Zaire, Kasai, Kivu, Shaba at 02. Zambia — 02. Zimbabwe — 02. Now, the key skill here is not memorizing every entry — it’s knowing how to use the table. When you’re planning a flight, you look up the departure and destination, read their offsets, and compute the time difference. And critically, you check the asterisk and the footnotes, because summer time and territorial exceptions will change your answer. One more thing to notice: the table is alphabetical, so you can scan quickly. And the half-hour and 45-minute entries — like Laccadive 05 30, Nepal 05 45, Norfolk 11 30 — remind you that not all time zones are whole hours. You must carry those minutes through your calculations. That’s the full picture of this table. When you’re ready, we can move on to how these offsets feed into actual time-of-arrival calculations.