Question

A fortnight is a charming English measure to time equal to \[2.0\;\] weeks (the word is a contraction of fourteen nights). That is a nice amount of time in the pleasant company but perhaps a painful string of microseconds in the unpleasant company. How many microseconds are in a fortnight?

Answer 1

Hint: Fortnight is 14 days. The term itself originates from fourteen + nights. Hence, the period of 14 nights is considered as a fortnight. Examples of a fortnight, when used in a sentence, are as follows: I need your bike for a fortnight; we spent a fortnight in search of a home.

Complete step-by-step solution:
A week is seven days, each of which has\[24{\text{ }}hours\] .
\[1{\text{ }}hour\] is equal to \[60{\text{ }}minutes\] and one minute is equivalent to 60 seconds.
\[1{\text{ }}hour = 60{\text{ }} \times 60 = 3600{\text{ }}seconds.\]
One week is equivalent to seven days.
Two weeks = \[14{\text{ }}days\]
\[ = 14 \times 24 = 336hours\]
\[ = 336 \times 3600 = 1209600\sec onds\]
Thus two weeks (a fortnight) is\[1209600{\text{ }}seconds\] . By the definition of a micro prefix, this is approximate\[1.21 \times {10^{12}}\mu s\].

Note: According to the Cambridge dictionary, “a period of two weeks is called fortnight”. According to the oxford dictionary, it’s a noun and fortnight meaning, “A fortnight is a period of two weeks”. There is also another word sennight and it means a time period of seven nights. Words such as sennight and fortnight appear to be leftover from ancient Germanic calendars which were known to reckon time not by days but by nights.