There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM. And even for the Americans that do know, virtually all of them (unless they are in the military or another profession that commonly uses 24h time), will have to "translate" by subtracting 12 in their head for PM times.
24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US.
> 24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US.
Sure.
> There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM.
1. Same is true for most people in the world
2. Wait, you mean they don't know if 17:00 is early morning or late afternoon??
Seriously, I have a hard time to believe that. I'll believe that most Americans need to convert to am/pm, but not that "huge swaths" literally cannot understand this.
My expectations of the average USA'ian are better than that.
If you did a “man on the street” interview in Tokyo, how many people there would know that Texans don’t ride to their oil rig job on horses? I lived in East Asia for many years and many people there assumed that I had a ranch and rode horses because I was from Texas.
“Men” on the street everywhere have their ignorances. Americans aren’t any smarter or dumber than people anywhere else. If we were talking about “Chinese people __” or “Nigerian people __” we’d complain about it being racist or stereotypical, yet we seem to have no problem casting stereotypes when the subject is American. Europeans especially seem to delight in it. There is this smug superiority that comes in these conversations. But start lifting rocks in European towns and you’ll find that people are equally smart and ignorant across the world. It’s a matter of perspective.
With the utmost respect, I disagree. In my experience, the average American seems much less knowledgable about the rest of the world when compared with Western Europeans/Canadians/Australians/Kiwis.
To be fair, it's not that they are less intelligent, it seems to be because they are less exposed to, and perhaps less interested in, other cultures/countries.
A huge part of that is geographic isolation and American cultural/media "dominance".
Is that how you're supposed to do it? All my life I've been subtracting 2 and ignoring the fist digit for PM times (with the exception of post 20:00 times). I just noticed that when I was a kid and been using that all this time
24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US.