Answers (1)
Get a ruler in your hands. Measure things until you start to understand how a ruler works. Measure some stuff and figure out where the center is. Say you measure a book and it's 7/8" thick. You look at your ruler and see that every eighth is divided into two sixteenths, so obviously half of 7/8" is going to be 7/16". If you write that out you have 1/2 x 7/8 = 7/16. And you notice that 1/2 is divided into 2/4 and then into 4/8 and so on, so you can convert anything to anything by multiplying all the numbers on top and then all the numbers on bottom.
Other rulers are divided into 10 and 100 parts. But an inch is still an inch, so anything on one ruler can be translated to the other ruler. A half inch on one ruler is 5/10 or 50/100 on the other. An eighth inch is just 12.5 marks when you have 100 marks per inch. A metric ruler divides an inch into 25.4 parts, so a half inch would be 12.7 of those parts. Pretty simple, isn't it? Practice this a bit and people will think you went to wizard school.
A conversion factor is a fraction equal to 1. You are given that one hour equals 60 minutes so you can write that as hr/60min=1 or 60min/hr=1 whichever works for you and drop it into an equation anywhere and it only changes the units.
ANSWER = You write this first so it looks like you know what you are doing. That gives you a bit of time to figure out what to do next.
ANSWER = (1/4)cm/km x 48 km
Ok, now we check everything. This is called sanity check and it is especially important in chemistry and physics where you might have a dozen or so conversions in a single equation. We have km below the line and again above, so that cancels. We have cm above the line and that appears in the answer like we want it. When you are sure everything is right, multiply all the numbers above the line and divide by all the numbers below.
ANSWER = (1/4)cm/km x 48 km = 12 cm