how many minutes are in 17 years

Answer 1

I like doing unit conversions... that's what this kind of problem is called. Minutes and years and months are all units, where a "unit" defines what the number of somethings is. In this case, we're dealing with units of time, and the problem looks like this:

17 years = X minutes

where we need to find out what number X stands in for.

The way to do this is by multiplying what is known (17 years) times whatever unit conversions we know until we get to the number of seconds. A unit conversion looks like this usually:

60 seconds = 1 minute

But it can also be written as a fraction that equals 1:

60 seconds

------------------ = 1

1 minute

Do you see why that equals 1? Because 60 seconds is the same as 1 minute, so this conversion fraction is the same as saying 23/23 = 1 or 2/2 = 1, if the top and bottom are equal, then the fraction's value = 1.

So to convert 17 years to seconds, we just need a series of conversion fractions, and we keep multiplying them until we get from years to seconds, like this:

17 years 365 days 24 hours 60 minutes 60 seconds

--------------- X ------------------ X --------------------- X -------------------- X ------------------- =

1 year 1 day 1 hour 1 minute

Now these conversion fractions are all carefully arranged so that there are matching pairs on the top and the bottom... years are on top and bottom, days top and bottom, same for hours and minutes. At the end we have "seconds" left on the top by itself.

To solve this, the units that are on top and bottom cancel each other out. After the first step, we've converted years to days, then to hours, then to minutes and finally to seconds. At each step we can cancel out the units that are on both top and bottom and they just disappear:

17 years 365 days 24 hours 60 minutes 60 seconds

--------------- X ------------------ X --------------------- X -------------------- X ------------------- =

1 year 1 day 1 hour 1 minute

Or...

17 x 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 = 536,112,000 seconds

(because all those 1 values on the bottom disappear when you divide by their product [1x1x1x1=1])

Now that is one way to calculate it, but it's not truly accurate and might be the wrong answer. It's close, but in truth there are MORE than 365 days in one year, but less than 366 days. A more accurate unit conversion is close to 365.24 days in a year, but to truly get to the exact number of seconds in 17 years, one should use a conversion factor that is precise out to about 9 decimal places, and I don't have such a conversion factor handy. And in fact, I don't think all years are precisely the same length, so the number of days in a year might vary such that there is no single conversion unit. But this answer is fairly close to the right answer, somewhere around 536 million seconds in 17 years.

Hope that helps explain how to do this type of unit conversion. The same approach applies to units of time, or length (meters, feet, inches, miles) or weight (kilograms, milligrams, ounces, pounds) or anything else.

Paul