Lesson 13 — Activity 1: Length


Getting Ready


We live close to the United States and receive a lot of our products from them. We also may travel to the US as well as see a lot of information on television from the United States. It is important to be able to convert metric lengths into imperial lengths so that we can easily understand what they are talking about.

                       Here is a speed limit sign in both imperial and metric units.

Image courtesy of www.imagesgoogle.com

Think about This:


Think for a moment about products you may have seen on TV ads that show lengths given in imperial units.

How about if you have travelled through the United States?

Were you able to do a conversion into metric units?



There are three main conversions we will use when changing metric units into imperial units. They are:

  • metres to feet
  • metres to yards
  • kilometres to miles


To convert metres to feet, use the formula:

# of metres x 3.28 =


For example, if you wanted to know how many feet were in 12 metres, you would calculate it this way:

12 x 3.28 = 39.36 feet


To convert metres to yards, use the formula:

# of metres x 1.09 =


For example, if you wanted to know how many yards were in 34 metres, you would enter the information in the formula like this:

34 x 1.09 = 37.06 yards


To convert kilometres to miles, use the formula:
 

# of kilometres x 0.621 =


For example, it is approximately 200 kilometres to Edmonton from Edson. To figure out how many miles it is, you would enter the information in the above formula.

200 x 0.621 = 124.2 miles 


Try this:


Kris drove 160 km on one tank of gas. How many miles did she travel? Use the formula above to solve. (Use a calculator to solve.)



160 x 0.621 = 99.36
Kris drove 99.4 miles.



Go to the next page to try a Self-check Activity on converting metric measurements to imperial units.