What is Elapsed Time? – Definition & Examples
lapsed time is simply the amount of time that passes from the beginning of an event to its end. In this lesson, you will learn how to solve for elapsed time and explore how it can be used in your everyday life.
Defining Elapsed Time
Say it is currently 3:35pm in the afternoon and you are supposed to meet your best friend for dinner at 6:20pm. Before you leave your house you have to clean your room, shower, get dressed, and still have time to get to your friend’s house. Do you just wing it and hope you make it there on time? Or do you use your awesome math skills to figure out how much time you have to finish all of your tasks and arrive for dinner at 6:20pm?
Elapsed time is the amount of time that passes from the start of an event to its finish. In simplest terms, elapsed time is how much time goes by from one time (say 3:35pm) to another (6:20pm).
An important tool that goes hand and hand with elapsed time is the clock. Here are a few things we need to remember before we move on to calculating elapsed time.
Clock
The hour hand on the clock is the shorter hand.
The minute hand on the clock is the longer hand.
We read time by looking at the hour hand first and then counting the minute hand.
Each number on the clock equals five minutes.
Now, there can be some difficulty when you try to just count in your head to figure out how much time has gone by, or elapsed. Instead of just jumping straight into using mental math (something that can increase our possibility for errors), we are going to learn about a really cool and easy way that we can organize our reasoning and make us experts in no time at solving for elapsed time.
Elapsed Time Number Line
Let’s look back at the example. We know that it is currently 3:35pm, and we have to be at dinner at 6:20pm. This means our start time is 3:35pm and our end time is 6:20pm.
The first thing you always do when solving for elapsed time is to figure out your start time and end time. Once you have your important times, your next step is to draw a number line with these times.
Number Line
Now, people might differ on how they use their number line, but in our case, we are going follow a procedure that I think is the easiest to visualize. First, we are going to count to the nearest hour after our start time of 3:35pm. Looking at a clock, we know that the next hour to pass would be 4:00pm. So counting from 3:35 to 4:00 we see that there are 25 minutes between the two times. We are going to label this on our number line.
Number line from 3:35pm to 4pm
Our next step is to figure out the nearest hour before our end time. Looking at a clock, we know that the closest hour before 6:20pm would be 6:00pm. So, counting from 6:00pm to 6:20pm, we see that there are 20 minutes between the two times. We are going to label this on our number line.
Number line from 6pm to 6:20pm
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