Page 2 - MEASURING MASS, LENGTH AND TIME

MEASURING LENGTH, MASS AND TIME

A. MEASURING LENGTH

Length is defined as the measurement or extent of something from one end
to the other end. Every experiment in Physics requires the use of length to

get desired results. All the external physical measurements rely on length.
As an example take your height. How will you measure your height? What

is your height? Height is simply the distance between your feet and head.

To measure the height you can use either a scale or measure stick.

We need a unit to define the length of something as without unit we won’t
be able to compare measure or correlate two objects on the terms of their

length. The standard unit of Length is a meter, but being a small unit we
refer to big units to make measurements simple. Some examples of the unit

are:

Height is measured in “foot” and “inches”, 1 feet contains 12 inches, and
1 inch means 0.0254 meters

Distance is measured in kilometers, 1 kilometer or Km equals to 1000

meter. While performing experiments in Physics lab we prefer small units

like millimeter and centimeter, 1 meter = 100 centimeters, and 1 centimeter
= 10 millimeters, to avoid writing meter, again and again, we write centimeter

as cm, millimeter as mm and decimeter as dm. To convert from one unit to
another, we can use the following ladder method