Why Base 60?

 Speculative phase:

(1) Think for yourself why 60 might be a convenient, significant or especially useful number to use as the base for a number notational system. What is special about the number 60? How is it different from 10?

(2) Then think for yourself how we still use 60s in our own daily lives, in Canada, and across cultures if you have knowledge of other systems (like the Chinese zodiac and time-telling system, for example.) Why is 60 significant in so many situations involving time and/or space?

Answer to (1) and (2): 60s are used a lot in circular objects. The number/base 60 is used in clocks, degrees, and various circular objects. I think that another reason 60 is widely used is its divisibility by so many numbers. Among the numbers less than 120 that have the most factors (12 different factors), 60 is the smallest one to do so. Since a lot of things have to be split and proportioned, 60 (unlike 10) is a good base number and a denominator because it can give pretty clean fractions.

Research phase:

(3) Finally, do a bit of research via the internet and/or the library to find out what others have learned about the significance of 60 in Babylonian numeration systems, in our contemporary world, and possibly across cultures.

Answer to (3): My intuition was roughly correct regarding the Babylonian's usage of base 60. I read that 60 is a good number to use as a base for fractions, especially with its divisibility by the number 3. This is useful because with ancient Babylon having no decimal system, doing fractions by base 10 would be complicated and inefficient due to its lack of factors. This applies to our contemporary world as well, especially in clocks and circular objects. The only difference is that we have a decimal system to compare different fractions, which helps us make better sense of numbers.