Metric Unit Conversions

>> Alright. Conversion for metric units -- so in the last video, we went over what all this means, this giant table up here. And again, these are our ones, tens, hundreds, thousands; tenths, hundredths, and thousandths -- it's all based on grams, so there's tens grams, hundred grams, thousand grams, a tenth of a gram, hundredth of a gram, and a milligram, which is a thousandth of a gram. So if we want to convert -- and remember, meters, this is all length; grams is all weight; and liters is all volume. So you can only convert within. You can't go, "Oh, I'm going to convert grams to liters." So unless you're a major chemist, it's not going to happen. Grams to meters, these are different types of measurements, so we're going to be doing meters to meters, and we're going to do decimeters to kilometers. So we want to convert a tenth of a meter to a thousand meters. What we notice that's just powers of 10. So what you have to do is look at the deci-, right there; deci's right here. Remember, da is deca-, d is just deci-, and the last letter tells us what type we have, so we're dealing with lengths. We want to go from deci- to kilometers, so we've got to go straight to the base -- you can't skip the base unit. Remember, they're tenths, ones. And then from the ones, we go to deca-, and then from deca- to hecto-, and then from hecto- to kilo-. So this is our conversion method -- we have to turn deci- into base, the base into a deca-, deca- into hecto-, and hecto- into kilo-. Well, here's how clean that is -- it's all about the direction. All that we're dealing with is powers of 10, so if you want to go from deci- to kilo-, you just go over one, two, three, four, because that's all we did -- one, two, three, four. Four loops there, four loops here, and that's what our new decimal is. So the answer is this. So 300 decimeters is the same as three-hundredths of a kilometer, so .03 kilometers. Isn't that nice? Watch. So hecto- goes to centi-. So we're going to start here, we've got to go this direction. We don't skip the base, and we've got to go all the way to centi-, so that's one, two, three, four, and you're going this direction. Last one, we went this direction. So we have to go in the same direction that we move -- one, two, three, four. And now we have centiliters. Isn't that nice? It's nice and clean. Watch, we'll do it again now. So we're going to start with grams; grams is right in here. That's our base, we put the dot here, and we've got to go grams to centigrams... so over one, two, to centi-. And we went to the right. So the decimal will always be after the number, so we go over one, two, so it's 700 centigrams. And that's it! This is metric unit conversion -- there's no... there's no tricks or anything to it. You just move the decimal; that's it. And that's why the metric system is beautiful. So I've got some problems for you to try -- the little hint and examples there. All you're going to do is look at what we did up here, and move the decimal. That's it, okay? So you're going to convert from centi-, convert the following to centi-. So if you start with decimeters -- remember, it's, "King Henry Died By Drinking Chocolate Milk." Move that over a little bit... there we go. Alright. So if we want to go from deci- to centi-, we're at deci- right here -- to centi-, and that's milli- off to the side. That's one to the right, so that's why we go one to the right, and you get 45 centimeters. So you're going to convert all of these to centimeters. If there is no prefix in front, that means it's our base unit right here. Base, it's just a meter. Remember, it's like three feet, but this is .3 of it. So convert them. Give them a shot, hit Pause now, and try it. If you get them wrong, go back and correct them and see why you made a mistake. Hit Pause now. Alright, and here are the answers. So again, check them; if you get them wrong, go back and look and see why they're wrong. Make sure that you have the correct units -- these are all kilo- so you should have kilometers, because it's meters; this is liters, you should have kilometers; this is grams, you should have kilograms. This is grams, you have kilograms. On the ones above, we wanted just a base unit -- so grams, meters, or liters; so you should have meters, grams, meters, and liters, because that's the last letter -- number with the letter in front. That's how many of these you have. Alright. Thank you. Alright, thank you.