How Many Seconds Are In a Year?

Do you ever just sit or lie around and wonder about time and think, “How many seconds are in a year?”. How did someone think of a conversion factor to count all the units of time in existence? We all have our philosophical moments in life wherein we wonder how the universe is the way it is. Just like how Earth started to form, how can someone make up all of the months in a year and have the diligence and patience to list it. These very questions that make us wonder are the reasons why we found multiple discoveries throughout life because we wanted to answer our curiosities in life.

In this article, you will be finding out how many seconds are there in a year. This will include mathematics but do not be overwhelmed! It is not as hard as you may think!

What is a Second?

A second is one of the smallest units of time that will quickly turn into minutes, then hours, days and up until the largest unit of time.

Life as we all know just comes to pass by so quickly without us even realizing it. All we sometimes think about is how we want to rush things to be over, especially the bad moments in life. All we sometimes think about is how to skip all of the harsh moments and just get to the great moments in life. Sometimes, we take moments for granted.

There will be some moments in life wherein we think that its value weigh less than the other moments we had especially with people we cherish a lot but we will realize later on as we look back that every moment was indeed beautiful despite the tragedy some might have caused us but we came to the other chapter of our story and become stronger.

This is a cycle that will only cease once we take our last breath so we should try to cherish every moment more regardless of how fruitful or bitter it is. This is why we should try to make good every time we have. Try to be productive, learn something new, find a new hobby, go out and have fun with friends! Make sure that every living moment you have here while you are still existing on this Earth is worth it and make sure you always seize the day!

All throughout life, we have made some split-second or whim type of decisions in life then changed them again at the last second due to second thoughts and hesitations. We also sometimes just stop what we are doing and wonder, “how many seconds have I used up?”. This is why in this article, we can try to count the seconds, we do not have to do it quite literally that starting from midnight, we’d start counting out loud or mentally. There is a system we use to count the amount of time and we call it “conversion factors”.

In figuring out how many seconds are within a year, we must start with learning the basics of the conversion factor. This is used to convert a specific quantity into a different unit of measure. In order to accomplish this, we must start with using a ratio or a fraction that would certainly equal one. For the ratio we will come up with, the conversion factor will be a multiplier that is applied to the bigger unit in order to convert it to its smaller units by multiplying them. 

It may sound daunting but it is actually quite easy. As an example, we can start with the year, the largest unit of measure of time. Then to convert this large unit into something smaller, in this example, we will convert it to a month, we must know how many months there are in a year, which are 12. Then we write it down into a ratio like this, 1 year: 12 months or in fraction form, 1/12. This makes the conversion factor as 12.

If you want to know how many months there are in 8 years, all you need to do is to multiply the number of years by the conversion factor. Thus, 8 years multiplied 12 months/year, which equals to 96 months in total within 8 years. So far, it has been easy, right?

Moving on to smaller units, you can continue on converting large units into smaller ones with the help of conversion factors. You just need to make sure that the conversion units you will be using are the same and accurate.

Here is the list of conversion factors for the unit of measure of time:

• 1 year = 365 days
• 1 day = 24 hours
• 1 hour = 60 minutes
• 1 minute = 60 seconds

So if we try to expound, it will go like this, one year would amount to 365 days, then multiply it by 24 since there are 24 hours in a single day, then continue to multiply the values by 60 since there are 60 minutes within a single hour then lastly, we will multiply the values to 60 since there are 60 seconds in a one minute. This is what it will look like if you write or type it down (365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds).

After loads of multiplying and conversion factors later, we will have an answer of 31,536,000 seconds within the span of a year or 365 days. Unbelievable! You may think that life sometimes moves forward too fast when in reality, after completing a revolution around the sun by Earth, it actually took 31 millions of seconds to finish.

Now that you know how many seconds are there in a year, what are you going to do with so much time you have?

Trivia Time!

Did you know that thousands of years ago, our ancestors used the sun, moon, and stars as the basis of time? As we go throughout the day, shadows shift and the sun and moon will come up at their highest or lowest thus finding out what time it is. Although not accurate, it is of basic knowledge that when the sun is high up in the sky, it is morning, and if the moon is high up, it is night.