Physics question

Question

If a measurement of the width of a table comes out to be 50 cm and you can tell that the maximum error in the measurement is 0.5 cm, the percent error in the measurement is about?

Answer 1

When given the error margin (which in this case is +- 0.5cm, or just 0.5cm when thinking in absolute value or magnitude), you simply have to take your error margin and divide by your total measurement. So in this case it would be 0.5 / 50 = 0.01 or 1%. This means your measurement of 50cm has a 1% percent error, when the error margin is 0.5cm. Hope this helps :)