Question

Long ago, people decided to divide the day into units called hours. They chose 24 as the number of hours in a day. Why is 24 a more convenient choise than 23 or 25

Answer 1

Answer:

Step-by-step explanation:

24 has a lot of factors

1 2 3 4 6 8 12 and itself.

It is easy to talk about fraction of a day. Like work is 8 hours which is 1/3 of a day. So is sleep. So is recreation. The description of how long it would take to walk 4 miles is about 1 hour

23 is prime. It has no other number that could divide into parts of a day. There's 1 and there's 23 and that's all. How would you say 1/3 of a day and have it meaningful, particularly if you didn't know much about fractions?

25 is nearly as bad, but not quite. It does suffer from not being about to have parts of a day evenly described as 1/3 or a day or 1/6 of a day.