physics problem

Question

The purpose of the sport called flight archery is to shoot an arrow the greatest possible distance. One of the greatest distances achieved in flight archery is 624 m. What would this distance be in decimeters?

Answer 1

Convert meters to cm, then 624 m x ( 100 cm/m) = 62400 cm

Convert cm to dm ( decimeter) , 1 dm = 10 cm, = 62400 cm x (1 dm/ 10 cm) = 6240 dm

Answer 2

Hi Gin:

The metric system is easy: all the measurement units increase (or decrease) by powers of 10.

The basic SI unit of length is the meter. Going down in size, we have the prefixes deci- (1/10), centi- (1/100), and mill- (1/1,000).

To summarize, a decimeter is one tenth of a meter; a centimeter is one tenth of that or one hundredth of a meter; and a millimeter is on tenth of a centimeter, or one thousandth of a meter.

Since a decimeter is smaller than a meter, the number of decimeters will be greater than the equivalent number of meters, by a factor of 10. Therefore, 624 m = 6,240 dm [dm is the abbreviation for decimeters]

Going the other way, to bigger units, we deka- = 10 times, hecto- = 100 times, and kilo- = 1,000 times.

So, a kilometer, abbreviated km, is simply 1,000 meter or mathematically 1 km = 1,000 m.

This makes it very easy to convert metric units.