Conversion Charts Help?

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

You just have to memorize this stuff, at least the ones you work with all the time. It's ok to bookmark the page so you can look up the others when you run across them.

There is a prefix every three powers of ten, except for 100, 10, 1/10, and 1/100. To go from one to another you use the LARD rule: LEFT ADD RIGHT DEDUCT. When moving the decimal to the LEFT you ADD to the power of ten. When going to the RIGHT you DEDUCT from the power of ten.

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. Learn this perfectly because it is normal in chemistry to do a dozen or so conversions in a single equation.

the web page (below) provides: Metric Conversions

If you live in the United States or in a country where metric system is not common, you might not understand how other people live in the metric world. If fact metric system is very straightforward and easy, you just need to get used to it.

To make a couple of conversions from or to metric you don't have to understand how it works. Simply pick what you want to convert in the menu on the left and get your result. However, if you are curious and want to know the principles of metric system, read on.

Metric System Principles

The metric system was devised in France in the 18th century. The goal was to replace the chaotic collection of units being in use with a system based on one common standard and simple decimal factors.

The standard for length was created by dividing the quarter of the Earth diameter by ten millions. The resulting length was named meter. The definition of meter changed several times since to make it more precise. The latest and the most precise definition of meter is "the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 second". The standards for other measurements in metric system were set in a similar way.

The metric system or International System of Units (SI) is based on seven base units for seven base quantities that are mutually independent. The quantites are: length (meter), mass (kilogram), time (second), electric current (ampere), thermodynamic temperature (kelvin), amount of substance (mole) and luminous intensity (candela). All other units are derived from the base ones.

All units of a particular measurement are consctructed from the corresponding base unit by adding some metric prefix. The table of metric prefixes useful for metric conversions is provided below.

Metric Prefixes

Metric prefixes are pretty easy to understand and very handy for metric conversions. You don't have to know the nature of a unit to convert, for example, from kilo-unit to mega-unit. All metric prefixes are powers of 10. The most commonly used prefixes are highlighted in the table.

By the way, you can make online conversions for metric prefixes on our Fractions and Percent page.

Prefix Symbol Power Factor

yotta Y 1024 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

zetta Z 1021 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

exa E 1018 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

peta P 1015 1,000,000,000,000,000

tera T 1012 1,000,000,000,000

giga G 109 1,000,000,000

mega M 106 1,000,000

kilo k 103 1,000

hecto h 102 100

deka da 101 10

deci d 10-1 0.1

centi c 10-2 0.01

milli m 10-3 0.001

micro µ 10-6 0.000,001

nano n 10-9 0.000,000,001

pico p 10-12 0,000,000,000,001

femto f 10-15 0.000,000,000,000,001

atto a 10-18 0.000,000,000,000,000,001

zepto z 10-21 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,001

yocto y 10-24 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001

Most people even in the countries where metric system is used only know the most important metric prefixes like 'kilo' and 'milli'. These are highlighted in the table above. Other prefixes like 'zepto' or 'yotta' are very specific and used mostly in science.