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Converting metric units of length

Learn convert kilometers, meters, and centimeters. Created by Sal Khan.

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Video transcript

What I want to do in this video is convert this amount of kilometers into meters and centimeters. So we'll first start with the 2 kilometers. And I encourage you to now pause this video and try to do this on your own. Well, the one thing that we know is that a kilometer literally means 1,000 meters. So you could literally view this is as 2 times 1,000 meters. Let me write that down. So this is going to be equal to 2 times 1,000 meters, which is equal to 2,000 meters. If we wanted to convert the 11 kilometers into meters, it's the same thing. 11 kilometers-- this right over here-- means 1,000 meters. So you could think of it as 11 times 1,000 meters. So 11 times 1,000 is going to be 11,000 meters. Now let's convert these distances into centimeters. And here we just have to remember that 1 meter is equal to 100 centimeters. Let me write that down. 1 meter is equal to 100 centimeters. And that's because the prefix centi means one hundredth. Another way you can write it is that one centimeter is equal to one hundredth of a meter. But here we have a certain number of meters, and each of those meters are going to be equivalent to 100 centimeters. So if we wanted to write 2,000 meters as centimeters, we could say, well, we have 2,000 meters. Each of those are going to be equivalent to 100 centimeters. And so this is going to be equal to 2,000 times 100. Well, that's going to be 2, and since where we have the three zeroes from the 2,000. And then every time you multiply by 10, you're going to add another zero. Or you're going to have another zero at the end of it. And we're going to be at multiplying by 100 is equivalent to multiplying by 10 twice. So we're going to have two more zeroes. So this is going to be 200,000 centimeters. Now let's do the same thing right over here with the kilometers, the 11 kilometers, which are 11,000 meters. And once again, I encourage you to pause the video and try to convert it into centimeters. Well, same idea. You have 11,000 meters, and each of them are equivalent to 100 centimeters. So this is going to be 11, and let's see, we have one, two, three, four, five zeroes. So this gets us to 1,100,000 centimeters.