Following our exponents test, we have started on the next unit of math which is measurement. So far we have learned the different ways people have measured objects, how to convert certain measurements into others, and how to calculate the surface and perimeter of an object. For this weeks blog post, I am going to show you how to convert a measurement into a different unit still retaining its value. Below, this is what we are going to refer to when converting international system or SI units. Below, is a number line of prefixes for measurements. This will be important to help us in converting between SI measurements.
Before we begin with the example, I will first explain the easy way in converting one SI unit to the other. The SI system or more commonly known as the metric system, is a system of measurement adopted by most countries in the world, only a handful (like the United States) using a different system. The metric system has revolutionized the world in measuring everyday things much easier. Below are prefixes for certain measurement units. The category in the middle is named unit because in there you can select any type of measurement you can choose in the system. For this explanation, we are going to choose meters. On the far right, we see the prefix MILLI which stands for one thousandth of a meter. This means that one thousand MILLImeters will fit in one whole meter. Progressing left, the prefix CENTI means one hundredth of a meter and DECI meaning one tenth of a meter. Now continuing past “unit”, the prefix DECA stands for ten, which means ten meters will fit into a DECAmeter. As we see the pattern is the addition of an extra zero every time we move left so following this, we can predict that one HECTOmeter is equivalent of one hundred meters and one KILOmeter is the same as one thousand meters. What makes this system so easy to use is that every time you are converting a measurement to another, all you need to do is move the decimal point of the number by how many times you turn left or right in whichever direction. So now we know all of the metric units we can start with our example.
So in this example, we are converting 29 kilometers into centimeters. The number line in the picture to the right represents the amount of times that the decimal point will move to the right. There are two ways we can do this, the less complicated way of doing this is just to move the decimal point over 
until it reaches our new unit like in the number line. So in this case we are going to move the decimal of 29 five places to the right which would be occupied with zeros for the answer of 2, 900, 000. Now the second way is a little more complicated however once we get to harder conversions, then it will be much easier to convert measurements. Before I begin, I wrote down all of the conversions on the left so that I know what the equivalent measurements are. Now to get that out of the way, I started off with writing 29 kilometers as a fraction. Then, the next thing that I did was to multiply that with another fraction but this time writing 1 kilometer on the bottom and 1000 meters on the top because they are equivalent. And finally, we multiply that with one more fraction and because meters was on the numerator, the next fraction will have meters on the denominator as 1 meter and on the top we have 100 centimeters because those two are equivalent. We then cancel out the units that we don’t need any more and then multiply the fractions together. In the end, in both ways we ended up 2, 900, 000.