Measurements

Measurements are very important in every aspect of our life.

If you are sick, you need to take medication in proper amount. What happen if you take too little or too much? For sure you are not going to get better.

When making a tea, you have to know the proportion of water to the tea bag. Can you imagine putting tea bag in a full pot of water?

Or, when building a fence for your garden, you have to know the length and width of your garden, without this information you wouldn’t know how much material you need to buy for the fence.

Measurements consist of a number and unit, and both are very important.

For example

3 miles or 24 inches

On a basic level, we can place measurements in a few categories: temperature, length, volume, or mass. For example, length we can measure in inches, mile, yards, and feet, but of course is not as easy as it looks. We have another system to express the units; it is called metric system. For example, a length can be measure in millimeters, centimeters, meters, or kilometers.

The problem arrives when we have to convert from one unit of measurement to another. Because I came from Poland, I’m used to the metric system, and I can understand when sometimes Americans have the difficulties to convert the units from the English system to the matric one, as I have the problem to convert the units from matric to English system. Today, I will show you how to do it in a very easy way.

I.              You need to have a conversion factor.

Length

1 meter = 39.37 inches or 1.094 yards or 100 centimeters, or 1000 millimeters

1 kilometer = 0,6214 miles or 1000 meters

1 inch = 2.54 centimeters

1 centimeter = 0.3937 inches

1 mile = 5280 feet

               1 foot = 12 inches

Lets say that you want to know how many kilometers has 34 feet

34 feet	12 inch	1 cm	1 m	1 km
	1 foot	0.3937 inch	100 cm	1000m

1 foot = 12 inches

1 cm = 0.3937

1 m = 100 cm

1 km = 1000m

Remember! You have to choose a conversion factor that cancels the units. In this example, feet canceled with feet, inch with inch, cm with cm and finally we have km.

II. Multiply the numbers in the top section, and then multiply the numbers in the bottom section. After having two answers, the top section has to be divided to the bottom section.

34x12x1x1x1 = 408 – the top section

1x0.3937x100x1000 = 39,370 bottom section

Top section / bottom section; 408 / 39,370 = 0.01036322; writing in scientific notation and rounding off, which I will discus in the next post, we have 1.0 x 10 ^-1  km