While driving home from class this afternoon, I was considering various topics for today's blog entry in my eJournal and images. We had worked on looking at a simple chart or graph to identify its most significant fact. Then, the students had to write it as a single sentence. Generally, exact numbers are modified so that 52% in a pie chart would probably be written in a sentence as "a bit over half". When trying to explain the concept I mentioned the differences in telling time with digital and analog watches. I grew up learning to say time as in this example: "It's almost ten to seven. I was probably in high school before digital watches became widespread. Suddenly, it was common to hear the former time expressed as: "It's six forty seven".
I suppose the change was situational and not permanent as analog clocks never disappeared. Do you form a different concept of the time in the two examples given?