Term 1 Week 5

Monday
For this week, we covered the units of measuring things such as length, mass, time, temperature, etc. I knew about some of these, but what was new to me was that these physical quantities or whatever you call them, have basic SI units, which are the standard units for measuring them. For example, the basic unit to measure mass is kg (not g), for length, m (not cm), for time, s (not min), etc. We also learnt completely new things, such as luminous intensity, which has cd, short for candela, as its basic SI unit, and amount of substance, which has mol, short for moles, as its basic SI unit.

We also learnt about the different magnitudes of the units. For example, 1kg is equivalent to 1000g, 1m is equivalent to 100cm. As the magnitudes are in powers of ten, this makes conversion between them much simpler than if the quotient of two units was a decimal. For example, conversion between inches and centimetres is difficult as when an inch is converted to cm, the result is a decimal. Thus, conversion between these units would often require a calculator.