2 Linear Measurements
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https://video.bccampus.ca/id/0_hnr3yqhy?width=608&height=50&playerId=23448552
Linear measurement can be defined as a measure of length. The length
of a table, the length of a piece of pipe and the length of a football field are all examples of linear measurement. We might also refer to it as distance.
Linear measurements represent a single dimension. This means there is only one line or one plane being measured. Basically it means that it’s a line of some type, either straight, curved or wherever you want the line to go. It could be like a road in Saskatchewan which is long and straight or it could be a road in the interior of British Columbia which can be narrow and windy. It doesn’t matter if the item or object you are measuring is straight on not. What you are measuring will only have a length.
Measuring length can be accomplished using many different types of units. You’ve heard of a mile, foot, yard and inch but have you ever heard of a furlong, link, pole or a league? Those are all examples of imperial linear measurement.
How about on the metric side. We have the metre, the centimetre and millimetre. Those would all be familiar to us. But how about micrometre, nanometre, pentametre, tetrametre and hexametre?
How we’ll work this section is to first define metric lengths of measurement and work with them and then we’ll move onto imperial lengths of measurement and work with them. After all that is done and settled we’ll move on to working between metric and imperial.
The Metric System of Linear Measurement
If I were to ask you what is an example of a metric unit of measurement how would you respond? I think most of us might say a metre or a centimetre or even a kilometre.
One of the interesting things about the metric system of linear measurement is that it’s all based on measurements of 10 and quite often it’s referred to as a decimal based system.
For example, there are 10 millimetres in a centimetre, and there are 10 centimetres in a decimetres, and there are 10 decimetres in a metre. See the pattern. Once you get this pattern then working in metric actually becomes quite easy.
Another cool aspect to the metric system is that everything is derived from a base unit. All other units go from there using multiples of 10. Take a look at the table below to see how this works.
| Unit | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| kilometre | 1,000 |
| hectometre | 100 |
| decametre | 10 |
| metre (base unit) | 1 |
| decimetre | 0.1 |
| centimetre | 0.01 |
| millimetre | 0.001 |
The idea with the above table is that the metre is the place where all the other numbers work back to. So, for example, to go from kilometres back to metres we would multiply by 1000. If we had a length of one kilometre that means we would have a length of 1000 metres.
If we were to go from centimetres to metres the chart tells us that a centimetre is 1/100 of a metre. Therefore if we had