ABSTRACT

The United States of America occupies the central portion of the North American continent. It extends across four time zones from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west. It comprises forty-eight contiguous states of various sizes, as well as the large peninsula of Alaska, adjacent to northwestern Canada, and the islands of Hawaii, located in the mid-Pacific Ocean. (Alaska and Hawaii entail two additional time zones.) It covers an area of 3,718,685 square miles or 9,631,420 square kilometers (Essential World Atlas 2001, vi; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States).