![]() A lot of things in our everyday lives are around the same size as a meter. The Sears Tower, the tallest building in North America, measures ~0.5 km (527 m) to the top of the antennae.Ī meter is a little bit bigger than a yard. It would take you approximately 23 minutes to walk across this bridge. The world's longest suspension bridge, Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, is just under 2 kilometer (km) long, measuring 1,991 m. Often is it hard to visualize what those numbers really mean-especially since base units in the metric systems are not something we may use in our every day life.įor those of us at UW-Madison, 1 kilometer is the distances from the edge of campus at Library mall to the steps of the Wisconsin state capitol building.īut, there are plenty of other things around the world that are on the scale of a kilometer. ![]() For mass, the base unit is the gram, so 1/100th of a gram would be written as a 1 milligram. Since the base unit for length is the meter the table below shows all the different prefixes that could be used to express length.ġ000 meters would be written as 1 kilometer. Prefixes are used to relate the relative size of the measurement with respect to the base unit. The base unit is then multiplied or divided by powers of ten to represent larger or smaller measurements. Scientists and the rest of the world use the metric system of measurement withīase units such as the meter, liter or gram. In everyday life the English system of measurement with units like feet, gallons and pounds is primarily used in the United States. The two systems of measurement used today are the English and Metric System. Through the ages, measurement systems became more standardized. A cubit measured on a small child would be very different than one measured on an adult. However, it is easy to imagine that these sizes vary greatly from person to person. The cubit could be divided into smaller segments, related to the size of different parts of the hand. In Egyptian times, the length of an object was measured in cubits-one cubit corresponded to the distance from one's elbow to the tip of one's middle finger. Is something bigger than a bread box? Will it fit through a doorway? Is it as big as it is supposed to be? These are all questions that we may find ourselves asking on a regular basis. It is useful to know the approximate sizes of things.
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