3 Weight Measurements
Click play on the following audio player to listen along as you read this section.
https://video.bccampus.ca/id/0_rr672xr1?width=608&height=50&playerId=23448552
How much do you weigh?
According to the “always correct” internet, the average Canadian man weighs 182 pounds or 82.7 kilograms and the average Canadian woman weighs 153 pounds or 69.4 kilograms.
Pounds and kilograms are just two of the ways weight can be measured. Sometimes you might hear weight referred to as mass.
Weight and mass are actually two different things but for the most part we refer to them as the same thing. Weight is a reference to the amount of force an object experiences due to the effects of gravity. If the gravitational pull changes, like if you were on the moon, your weight would change. The mass of an object would stay the same regardless of the gravitational pull of an object. The mass of an object refers to how much matter it contains. This does not change.
Whatever the case we will refer to weight and mass as the same concept.
If you want to know more about the difference between weight and mass check out the following link: Mass versus weight (Wikipedia)
The Metric System of Weight
When dealing with weight measurements in metric we follow a pattern similar to the one used for metric linear measurements. We start with the base unit which is the gram and all other metric weights have a multiplier that relates back to the gram.
Now remember with metric linear measurements there were a lot of them on that table and most of them we really didn’t deal with. Its the same thing with metric weight measurements. We won’t deal with all of them but rather just the few that we deal with the majority of the time.
So using our gram as the base unit we have:
| Unit | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| kilogram (kg) | 1,000 |
| gram (base unit) (g) | 1 |
| centigram (cg) | 0.01 |
| milligram (mg) | 0.001 |
From this chart we can conclude that there are 1000 grams in a kilogram and that there are 1000 milligrams in a gram. Once again using the multiplier we can go from one unit to the other.
Let’s throw in one other number here…the metric tonne.
[latex]\Large 1 \text{ metric tonne}= 1000 \text{ kilograms}[/latex]
Just for fun we’ll write down the metric weight of a few common (or maybe uncommon) items.
| Example | Weight |
|---|---|
| Usain Bolt (sprinter from Jamaica) | 94 kilograms |
| Hummingbird | 4 grams (average) |
| Grizzly bear | 300 kilograms (adult male average) |
| An electron | 9.109×10−31 kilograms (very light) |
| The sun | 1.989×1030 kilograms (very heavy) |
The best way for us to go about working with metric weights is to go through a few examples to get used to it.
Example
A bag of potato chips weights 48 grams. How many milligrams is that?
Step 1: Find the multiplier
What we see is that going from milligrams to grams the multiplier is 0.001. What this is saying is that a milligram is 1/1000th of a of a gram or that there are 1000 milligrams in a gram.