McGraw Hill Glencoe Geometry, 2012
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McGraw Hill Glencoe Geometry, 2012 View details
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Exercise 1 Page P3

To find the length of a computer keyboard, we can use a ruler. On a ruler, the metric units are usually centimeters, often abbreviated as

Extra

Metric Units of Length

We will review what we know about metric units of length. Let's start by taking a look at the table below which shows different units.

Metric Units of Length
kilometer = meters
meter = centimeters
centimeter = millimeters

Note that when we need to convert from smaller to larger units, we multiply. When we want to convert from larger to smaller units, we divide. Now let's assume that we measured our keyboard and found that it is centimeters long.

We will convert this measure to both larger and smaller metric units. Let's begin with the smaller unit, millimeters. Notice that there are millimeters in each centimeter.
We found that our keyboard is millimeters long. Now let's convert centimeters to kilometers, which are considerably larger than centimeters. To do so, we need to first change centimeters to meters. Since meter is centimeters, we need to divide by
Next, because there are meters in kilometer, we can change meters to kilometers by dividing the result by
Finally, we found that our keyboard is millimeters, or kilometers, long.