Unit 1 A Look at things from the metric point of view
Even if you are not consciously using metric math every day, hey, we can at least understand more lines in a movie : "Now the ship is only a half a kilometer away from crashing into the antimatter field!"
Most texts only ask about (from smallest unit of measure to largest):
about 1/25 of 1 inch
about half an inch
about a yard
about half a mile
millimeter (mm)
centimeter (cm)
meter (m)
kilometer (km)
1000 mm =
100 cm =
1 m =
.001 km or 1/1000 km
1,000,000 mm=
100,000 cm =
1000 m =
1 km
You can imagine how any calculation would be easier to solve (or at least quicker) if we are using the unit that requires as few zeros as possible. A quick check is to write "1 km" ten times, and then write "1,000,000 mm" ten times (or just enough times to get the point).
metric units used to measure, for example, the length of:
a finger nail
a desk
a wall
a street
in mm
in cm
in m
in km
There are many more metric units than these, but for this lesson, we will concentrate on millimeters, meters, and kilometers.
The kilometer is a distance used for measuring longer lengths, such as distances along a street or through the air by plane.
Here are video examples (not the videos that pop up when finished playing) of lengths going from kilometers to meters (and sometimes less...much less).
Something does not have to be several miles to measure the distance in kilometers. We can have a one kilometer race. A long step is about one meter, so 1000 steps can be seen as 1000 meters or 1 kilometer.
The meter is used for measuring lengths you could easily traverse by walking, or how far an object could be thrown.
Here are some video examples of lengths going from meters to millimeters.
FYI...a college basketball court is about 25.6 meters (84 feet long) by 15.24 meters (50 feet wide), while a football field is 91.44 meters by 48.76 meters (300 feet by 160 feet).
Look at the speedometer of a non-American car and you will see KPH (kilometers per hour) as well as MPH (miles per hour).
You must have Quicktime to view the next two videos. One is an example of what 50 meters looks like,
and the other is an example of what 75 meters looks like.
