Adding Time

By adding time, we mean adding hours, minutes, and seconds.  In order to be able to do this, one must know that there are 60 minutes to one hour, 60 seconds to a minute.  Knowing this, adding time simply requires that we add hours to hours, minutes to minutes, and seconds to seconds and know to carry over to the hour column whenever minutes add up to more than 60, and do the same for seconds.

Example:

Q: Add 23 hours, 47 minutes, and 53 seconds to 8 hours 27 minutes and 18 seconds.  To do this, we must write a column of hours, minutes and then seconds.


So we will have:

  23    47     53
    8    27     18

Now, we add the seconds and we see that 53 + 18 seconds gives us 71 seconds, so 71= 60+11 so we see that it is 11 seconds and a minute, or 60 seconds, so we carry 60 seconds over to the minutes column and we get:

             1
  23    47     53
    8    27     18
----------------------
                    11  

Now we add the minutes column and proceed in the same way by carrying over to the hour column whenever we have more than 60 minutes.  So 1+47+27=75=60+15 so we have 15 minutes and we carry over 1 hour for 60 minutes so we add 1 to the hour column.  So we get:

     1     1
  23    47     53
    8    27     18
----------------------
          15      11  
Now we just have the hours left over to add and nowhere to carry unless we have to account for days and months and so on, in which case we would carry over whenever we have 24 hours, 30 days respectively.

Adding the hour columns, we get:

     1     1
  23    47     53
    8    27     18
----------------------
  32    15      11  

So our final answer is 32 hours, 15 minutes and 11 seconds.