Measurement - Salisbury University



Measurement

What does it mean to measure something? Say I told you to measure the room. What questions come to mind? Perhaps…

What to measure- the area or perimeter of the floor, or the volume or space present.

What units do we use to tell “how much”- inches or feet, centimeters or meters, etc..

How to determine how many of those “how much” units that we have.

The answer to the first question will dictate how the second two are addressed. To see why answer the following.

1. Would you use millimeters, centimeters, or meters to measure

a. the distance from school to home

b. the length of your hair

c. the length of a pencil

2. How many paperclips long is

a. the door

b. your index finger

c. the length of the table

d. the length of the hall outside this room

3. Measure the length of a dollar bill with…

a. Inches

b. Centimeters

c. Millimeters

d. feet

e. paperclips

4. Use your answers to question 3 to answer the following

a. how are inches and centimeters related?

c, how are inches and millimeters related?

c. how are paperclips and feet related?

5. Estimate the following lengths in meters or centimeters or millimeters and then actually measure them.

Width of the board

Length of the classroom

Height of a table

Diameter of a penny

Thickness of one page of your book

6. Draw segments of the following lengths:

1 cm, 1 inch, 1 mm, 1 foot, 5 inches, 5 mm, 5 cm

It is useful to know approximations of certain units of measure.

Notice that…

1 meter is about 39 inches

1 mile is about 1.6 kilometers, so 1 km is about 0.6 miles

1 milliliter is about ¼ tsp of water

1 liter is just over 1 quart and is about 34 ounces

1 milligram is about the mass of one strand of hair

1 gram is about the mass of 1 raisin or dollar bill

1 kg is about 2.2 pounds

7. How high would a stack of one million pennies be?

8. How high would a stack of pennies worth 1 million be?

9. How many pennies would need to be stacked side by side to be as tall as the room?

10. Think of different objects that are…

10 millimeters long, 10 centimeters long, 10 inches long, 10 feet long

11. Do the following out of the hard book.

Page 646; 13,14,16,17,19,21,31

12. Sometimes it is more useful to express a large or small distance with some non standard unit of measure. Such as…

“the distance 1,000 meters long is three times the height of the Sears Tower (or the Eiffel Tower), or 60 railroad cars or 500 basketball players laid end to end (although they probably wouldn't like it very much )”

“In Chicago, one could walk from the Art Institute to the Field Museum to go a kilometer or travel 500 house numbers or 10 city blocks in Chicago “

Use the internet to find 3 more “unique” nonstandard ways to measure some everyday items.

13. Look up the distance from the earth to the moon and express it in “paperclips”, “pencils”, and feet.

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