How do you get a distance in centimeters?

Answer 1

centi means hundred, so 100 centimeters in 1 meter

I remember it like this

km hm dam m dm cm mm

kilometers hectometers decameters meters decimeters centimeters milimeters

If you have 1 meter than you have...

.001km .01hm .1dam 1m 10dm 100cm 1000mm

Answer 2

You want to remember that there are exactly 2.54 centimeters in an inch.

***Except for the answer, the below was copied and pasted.***

To answer conversion questions like this go to Google.com and in the search window, type in your question like this..

24 cups in gallons

or this

4000 square feet in acres

or this

45 inches^3 in liters

and it will if you a direct answer.

It is great for this.

In your case type in

1 cm in inches

Note, you can also use the Google search window as a calculator. You might type in

23.5 x 54^2 x sqrt 5 =

If this is a homework question, the below is a very powerful and easy method to convert numbers from one unit to another.

Let us take an easy example.

Say you have 2.7 meters and you want to convert it to centimeters.

You know that 1m = 100 cm

Think about how we can take the equation 1m = 100 cm and divide both side by "1m" and get 1= 100 cm/m. (We have "re-arranged" the equation.)

Now think about how it is that if you multiply 2.7m by the number 1 you simply get 2.7m again.

Now think about how since "100 cm/m" equals 1 because 1= 100 cm/m you can multiply 2.7 m by "100 cm/m" and you will have the same distance. The only difference is that after you cancel out the meters the distance will be expressed in different units.

Here it is expresses mathematically...

2.7m = 2.7m X 1 = 2.7m X 100 cm/m = 270 cm. Notice how the meters cancel each other out and you are left with centimeters.

This always works

Here is a harder example.

Convert the speed 8,100 m/s to the units of km/hr

As discussed above since 1000m = 1 km, we will in this case divide both sides of the equation by "1000m" and get 1=(1/1000)km/m.

when we multiply by that and cancel out the meters, we get 8,100 m/s = 8.1 km/s.

(Note that we could have taken the equation 1000m = 1 km and divided both sides by "1km" to get 1 =1000m/km and then DIVIDED by 1000km/m and the meters would have still canceled out. Here is the math 8,100m/s = 8,100m/s / 1 = 8,100m/s / 1000m/km = 8.1 km/s )

Now to convert the seconds to hours we first convert the seconds to minutes by taking the equation 1min = 60s and dividing both sides by "1min" to get the equation 1 = 60s/min

When we multiply 8.1 km/s by the above we get 480 km/min

We do the same thing with the equation 1hr = 60 min to get 1 = 60 min/hr and when we multiply, we get 28,800 km/hr which is in the correct units.

For some reason it is not the law for physic teachers to tell their students about this method.

Here is website that goes into it in more detail.

http://oakroadsystems.com/math/convert.htm#Intro

Answer 3

Centimeters don't have an average length, they are all exactly the same, at 1/100 of a meter