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LONGITUDE and The Unit of Length: The Meter.
Hello friends! Welcome to a new Happy Learning video. Today, we are going to learn about the distance there is between one place and another. Or how we measure the height of a giraffe… Today, we are going to talk about what it is and how to measure longitude.
As we said before, longitude is the distance there is between two points, for example the distance between your house and school.
The most important unit of length is the meter and it is represented by the letter m, 100 m are 100 meters.
The meter measures distances but it also measures things such as the height and width.
This giraffe, for example is 5 meters long and this swimming pool is 25 meters long and 10 meters wide.
But what happens if what we want to measure is smaller than a meter? It’s easy peasy! We need to divide the meter in equal smaller parts.
If we divide a a meter in 10 equal parts… We call each of these little parts a decimetre and we represent it with the letters dm. A meter has 10 decimetres.
If we divide it in 100 equal parts, we call these units centimetres and we represent them with the letters c and m. A meter has one hundred centimetres.
And so, if we divide the meter into 1000 equal parts, we call these tiny parts millimetres and they are represented by two m’s. One meter has a thousand millimetres.
To measure these smaller units we use a ruler o a meter, which as you can see, divides each centimetre into 10 equal parts, in other words, in millimetres.
To measure larger distances than a meter, we use the kilometre, that is exactly 1000 meters.
For example, did you know how much distance there is between Spain and Mexico? Well there are 9025 kilometres and by plane, we take about 10 hours travelling this distance.
Well, now we’ve learnt the units to measure the longitude, but there’s something you need to bare in mind. Not all countries use the meter as a means of measuring longitude.
In England, and United States for example, the units used are yards and miles instead of meters and kilometres. A yard is equal to 914 centimetres and a mile is 1.609 meters.
It’s a bit strange that we don’t all measure in the same units, but that’s what the world is like.
Bye friends! And don’t forget to suscribe to Happy Learning Tv!
