USA time zones

There are only 2 right, or am I wrong? I know Russia supposedly has like 11 or 12 different time zones. Yet it is such a wide country [continent?]. So where is the cut off point and any idea why?

There's like, four or five

Atlantic
Eastern
Central
Mountain
Pacific

The cut off zones? That's trickier. It's easier to just name a city and someone can tell you what time zone it's in. One state doesn't follow time zones. I think it's Arizona. Then you got Hawaii and Alaska. Not sure where they fit in. If you count their zones, could be more than five.

Oh wooops. Why is it on so many American sporting events they only put 2 different times for the event, depending where you are? They have one time that is 5 hours behind where I live and another that is 8 hours behind.

Because of television delays. They won't delay for Central. We start all our programming an hour behind Eastern. But, they will delay for Pacific because it's just too inconvenient not to. Everything would be four hours behind if they didn't.

Here is a nice interactive site which shows different time zones timeanddate.com/time/map

Actually, it's not really an hour behind since it's the same time here just different numbers. When it's seven pm here, it's eight on the east coast so they see the programming at eight, we see it at seven but we are actually seeing it the same time they are.

But, mountain and pacific time zones are not seeing it at the same time. They have to wait until their clocks say seven to see it. So, it's kind of like the folks on the East coast see everything first but not really, lol. Gets confusing, don't it?