Converting Units

To find the equivalent of a unit in another unit we use conversion factors. A conversion factor is a number, which times the unit is equivalent to the unit you want to convert to. For example 1 foot is equivalent to 12 inches, so 3 feet would be equivalent to 36 inches. Another example is: how many seconds are there in three days? We know that 1 minute has 60 seconds, an hour has 60 minutes and a day has 24 hours. So we do the following:

We always start from the unit we're converting, in this case we're converting days to seconds, so we start from 3 days. Then we multiply it by the equivalent of 1 day in hours. Then by the equivalent on 1 hour in minutes and by the equivalent of one minute in seconds. In this case the number we have to divide by is one, so the operation is just a multiplication, but this doesn't always happen, for example when we try to convert a velocity from Kilometers an hour (Km/h) to meters a second (m/s).

The following tables show the most commonly used convertion factors.

* This conversion factor comes from the following equation:

If you want to do some exercises about converting units click here.

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