At four o’clock the minute hand is on the 12 and the hour hand is on the 4.  The angle formed is 4/12 of the total number of degrees in a circle, 360.

4/12 * 360 = 120 degrees

There are degrees in one complete revolution of a circle. There are minutes in one hour.

Create a fraction out of these two quantities to use later as a conversion rate:

Between the and there are minutes, so multiply this by the conversion rate to solve for the number of degrees:

A analog clock is divided up into 12 sectors, based on the numbers 1–12. One sector represents 30 degrees (360/12 = 30). If the hour hand is directly on the 10, and the minute hand is on the 2, that means there are 4 sectors of 30 degrees between then, thus they are 120 degrees apart (30 * 4 = 120).

You can think of a clock in two ways:

1. Out of 12 hours, or

2. In terms of a circle with

If you try to solve it in terms of #1:

Goal: Find the angle measurement between the hour and the minute hands. We only want to find the degrees between the hours of 9 and 12

So we are looking at 3 hours out of the 12 total hours on a clock.

As a fraction:

So that means that the clock hands are making an angle that is 1/4 of the clock (which is a circle). So knowing that a circle has in it,

1/4 of a circle is .

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2. If you think of the clock as a circle first you can determine the angle that the clock hands create very quickly.

Since there are in a circle, every hour that passes is a movement of . So knowing that, the clock will be moving 3 hours:

Like any circle, a clock contains a total of . Because the clock face is divided into  equal parts, we can find the number of degrees between each number by doing . At 5:00 the hour hand will be at 5 and the minute hand will be at 12. Using what we just figured out, we can see that there is an angle of  between the two hands. We are looking for the larger angle, however, so we must now do . 

The entire clock measures 360°. As the clock is divided into 12 sections, the distance between each number is equivalent to 30° (360/12). The distance between the 2 and the 3 on the clock is 30°.  One has to account, however, for the 10 minutes that have passed. 10 minutes is 1/6 of an hour so the hour hand has also moved 1/6 of the distance between the 3 and the 4, which adds 5° (1/6 of 30°). The total measure of the angle, therefore, is 35°.

On first glance, this problem may seem simple in that the angle between the 3 and 6 on a clock is one quarter of a circle or 90 degrees. However, you must take into account that in the half hour that has passed from 3:00 to 3:30, the hour hand has moved half the distance between the 3 and 4. To find the degrees, simply divide the total number of degrees in a circle by 12 to find the degrees between each consecutive number, and then multiply that number by 2.5 because you have half the distance to the 4, and the the full distance to the 5 and the full distance to the 6. Thus,

By dividing the clock into pieces, we can determine that the angle between the two hands is .

Within a clock, just like any circle, there are 360 total degrees. 

Within an clock, there are 60 total minutes.

Each minute that passes, the minute hand advances 6 degrees. The hour hand advances .5 degrees. But since it is 9am on the dot, we will just be using the minute hand to count the degrees. 

Since the minute hand is covering a total of 15 minutes in between it and the hour hand, we can do the math:

 =

To solve this question recall that a clock is a cicle and a circle is comprised of 360 degress.

To find how many degrees lie between each of the twelve numbers on the clock, divide 360 by 12.

.

From here, we will multiply 30 degrees by 4 to find the degree angle of for the hands of the clock at 4:00.

Another approach is to simply divide 4 by 12 to determine what percentage of the circle the hands will cover, and then multiply that number by 360, which is the full degrees in a circle. Thus,

.

With one hand at o'clock and the other at o'clock, the configuration encompases of the complete of a full circle.

Therefore, we can determine the angle of the configuration as such: