Self-study activity:
Watch the CNN video and complete the statements below.
1 Originally daylight saving was started out to help...
2 During World War I Daylight Saving Time was made official to...
3 2005 is important because...
4 Around the globe Daylight Saving Time is not practised in...
5 Savings as a noun is...
You can check the answers by reading the transcript below.
You can also watch the CBS video that we published last year Changing the time.
This is not a complex issue. Daylight saving is basically self-explanatory. It's saving daylight.
Originally, daylight saving was one of those things where it was originally for agrarian societies. It was to use the… get the most use out of as much daylight as you possibly could. It was certainly helpful with farmers, certainly helpful with fisherman. But then later, in later years, it actually began, daylight savings was actually practiced for the sole purpose of really saving energy.
We've been following Daylight Saving Time in the United States for quite a while. It really first became official back during World War I for the sake of growing extra food for troops overseas. It was brought back for World War II, but recently it was the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that was the real difference maker, that made it more of a formal type of exercise that has been basically followed by every state in the United States, with a few exceptions, that being, of course Arizona, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the American Samoas.
Internationally, it's kind of a hodgepodge around the globe. If you took a look at the planet, and you were to light up places that were experiencing daylight saving, you'd see really just a hop, skip and a jump from one continent to the other. It's kind of varied, wherever you happen to do. There's some places, I can tell you, in Africa, where there are many spots where they don't practice it. There are many places, obviously, in parts of Asia. Europe, though, practices it for the most part.
OK.
Now we're getting to the nitty-gritty stuff. This is the stuff that drives people crazy. To me, it's daylight saving. It's a verb. It's something we're doing. We're saving daylight. Savings is a noun. That's something that you have at the bank. Obviously, we're using the verb.
It's very possible that, at some point, we may indeed get rid of Daylight Saving Time. But for the time being, it is certainly here, and it's something we've got to deal with, for better or for worse.
