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51 Units
In the late 1700's, as scientists began to develop the ideas of physics and chemistry, they needed better units of
measurements to communicate scientific data more efficiently. Scientists needed to prove their ideas with data
based on measurements that other scientists could reproduce. A decimal system of units based on the meter as a
standard length, the kilogram as a standard mass, and the liter as a standard volume was developed by the French.
Today this system is known as the SI system, or metric system. The equations below show how the meter is
related to other units in this system of measurements.
1 meter
=
100 centimeters
1 cubic centimeter
=
1 crrr'
=
1 milliliter
1000 milliliters
=
1 liter
The SI system is easy to use because all the units are based on factors of 10. In
the English system, there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and 5,280 feet
in a mile. In the SI system, there are 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 100
centimeters in a meter, and 1,000 meters in a kilometer. From the graphic, how
many kilometers is it from the North Pole to the equator?
Answer: You need to convert 10,000,000 meters to kilometers.
Since 1 meter
=
0.001 kilometers, 0.001 is the multiplication factor. To solve,
multiply 10,000,0000.001 km
=
10,000 km. So, it is 10,000 kilometers from
the North Pole to the equator.
These are the standard units of measurement that you will use in your scientific
studies. The prefixes above are used with the base units when measuring very large or very small quantities.
When you are measuring:
Use this standard unit:
Symbol of unit
.
mass
kilogram
kg
length
meter
m
volume
liter
I
force
newton
N
temperature
degree Celsius
°C
time
second
s
You may wonder why the kilogram, rather than the gram, is called the standard unit for mass. This is because the
mass of an object is based on how much matter it contains as compared to the standard kilogram made from
platinum and iridium and kept in Paris. The gram is such a small amount of matter that if it had been used as a
standard, small errors in reproducing that standard would be multiplied into very large errors when large
quantities of mass were measured.
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