For instance, a foot...is basically a foot length. So there's this foot-measuring waddle some people do walking literally heel-to-toe to get a general sense of the space. An inch is kinda a finger width, etc (they're all not perfect by any sense).
I've decided to just take the plunge and basically re-learn all my measurement systems because I'm seeing less and less of those being used. I started with just memorizing all the conversions but that's literally just adding another step. Everything I own basically has settings to switch or show both measurements (like tape measures) so I'm just going to stop using Fahrenheit and the United states "Customary System" all together.
Any tips or things you're taught or pick up on? There's a funny primary school poem for conversion of customary liquid measurements,
Land of Gallon
Introducing capacity measurement to learners can be challenging. To make this topic more accessible and memorable, we can integrate creative and interactive activities into our teaching approach. Using storytelling, we can transform the sometimes daunting task of learning measurement conversions into a whimsical tale.
- In the Land of Gallon, there were four giant Queens.
- Each Queen had a Prince and a Princess.
- Each Prince and Princess had two children.
- The two children were twins, and they were eight years old.
Once students are familiar with the story be sure they see the connection between the story characters and the customary units of capacity measurement. If necessary, label the story pieces with their corresponding units of measure: queen = quart, prince/princess = pint, children = cups, 8 years old = 8 fluid ounces. You can reduce the number of customary units in the story based on student readiness. link
tl;dr looking for anything to remember the hierarchy and memorizing the metric and Celsius measurement system, sometimes explained in schooling or local sayings. (if I had an example for those systems I would give one lol).
Uhm, it might sound arrogant but in metric you don't need that sort of thing? The next order of measurment is just ±10^x where X is the number of dimensions you want to look at: 10 for i.e. length, 100 for area and 1000 for volume.
Lets look at length: Most commonly used are Millimeter, Centimeter, Meter and Kilometer.
Meter is the base. The name centimeter derives from meter and the Latin word centum meaning 100.So a centimeter is hundredth of a meter (decemeter, 10th, ist not really used much in everyday life). One step further down is millimeter: mille is Latin for thousand, therefore a millimeter is a thousandth of a meter.
Going up Greek prefixes are used: Deka-(10) and hektometer (100) are rarely used and Greek chilloi means thousand and therefore a kilometer is 1000 meters.
Staying in one dimension the same applies to gramme for weight: Milligrams, Gram and Kilograms are the moat common.
Going up in dimensions we use the same prefixes but the multiplyer changes because 10^2 is 100. So to go from 1 m² (one meter to the width times one meter depth) to 1 km² (thousand meters wide times thousand meeter deep)) the multiplier is not 10³ (1000) but 100³.
The whole prefixes are effectively optional and just for better readability.
Not arrogant, I get the hierarchy statements being mundane especially for someone who's inundated within the systems themselves. The honest answer to this is sometimes everyone doesn't learn at the same pace or get upset when they're confronted with something different. For instance, if I were working with someone that didn't complete school or had a learning disability, I could see them eventually grasping milli and centi (I still hesitate with if I'm using them properly with MM/mm/mM) but then hekto-deka is another tall order for someone who just wants to get off work and have a beer without the hassle lol. A school yard saying that uses order listing as an acronym for a Mnemoic like EGBDF in music (Every Good Boy Does Fine) would be cool.
Mostly though, it's more about like the "foot" measurement thing. Something like wrapping my head around the average body weight, cool factoids like comparing volumes of water or like someone commented that 100 is the boiling point, etc.
edit: @[email protected] just responded with the mnemonic I was looking for lol.
As many other said, milli and kilo are the prefix you are going to use 90% of the time, with the exception of centimeters. Food and beverage products are measured in kg, liters or milliliters, furnitures are measured in mm, cm or meters, distances are in meters or kilometers. Everything else is relatively uncommon. If you are not used to them you can still use some rough estimates, at least to get a sense of scale, but it's generally not used by people who learn it first.
For example, the width of a finger is a few centimeres, a bottle of water is usually 1 or 1.5 liters, a leg of an average male is around 1 meter long, a kilometer is how much you walk in 5 minutes, and so on.
As for the writing, the rules are quite simple: the base measurement is always in lowr case (m, g, l), you might see liter written as L instead of l but, while common, is technically wrong. For the modifiers, most are lower case, some are upper case to distinguish
1000 = kilo k 100 = hecta = h 1/10 = deci = d 1/100 = centi = c 1/1000 = milli = m 1000000 = mega = M
There are more specific rules for scientific units of measures, like if the abbreviation of the base unit is more than ine letter, the first is upper case (1 Pascal, the measure of pressure is 1 Pa instead of 1 pa), but if you don't work in STEM, you likely won't care.
Sure, it's always a step of 10x, but you do have to remember all the prefixes. Or you can only remember the 1000x prefixes - but you also need to remember centi-. Then, nobody says "megagram" - it's "ton". So there are quirks to remember.
We absolutely should, though... That and megameters, for car mileage. We always round off to the nearest thousand kilometer anyway.
Yes/No. There are quirks such as "ton" but in essence you can say 1 million gram and everything is fine. Remembering all those short forms is a nice to have, not a requirement.
There's a strong possibility that I'm just dumb, but this used to trip me up at first. Especially if I was on the spot: 1250mm to m, go! Uh, 125.0? Uh, 12.50?! Uh, 1.250! Yeah!
Or 1.5L to mL, go! Uh, 150mL? Uh, 1500mL! Yeah!
Also, realizing that the most popular prefixes are either kilo 1000x or milli 1/1000 helped. For example, cm don't seem very common, like dimensions are almost always in mm.
I heard someone say once, the metric system is better by a thousand.