Maria Elisa asks:
I have some doubts about telling the time:
I learnt at school that when I set the clock to a "minutes to" or "minutes past " the hour, I'm to say the word minutes after the number:
i.e., it's two minutes past three
But as things change and languages as well, I heard people omitting "minutes".
Can I accept the sentence without "minutes" or do I have to consider it a mistake?
We native English speakers are very lazy! We don't want to say "can not" if we can say "can't." And we're very happy to say "It's two past three" instead of "It's two minutes past three."
For the same reason, we also say, "It's a quarter past three" instead of "It's a quarter of an hour past three."
No, it's not a mistake. It's just informal English, so widely used that we don't even think about it any more.
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