Question Video: Converting Capacities from Milliliters to Liters Mathematics

Video Transcript

The table shows the amount of liquid that Gloria drinks in a day. How many litres of liquid does she drink in total?

And the table tells us that she drinks two hundred and ninety-three millilitres of juice, four hundred and fifty-four millilitres of milk, and one point one litres of water.

Let’s just quickly recap litres and millilitres. These are measurements of volume in the metric system. The word litre appears in both of these measurements and you’ve also got the prefix ‘milli’ in millilitre. Now milli means a thousandth of. So this means a millilitre is a thousandth of a litre or there are a thousand millilitres in one litre.

So think about it. If you’ve got one litre, that’s a thousand millilitres. So if we want to look at the numbers of these things, in order to convert litres into millilitres, there are a thousand times as many millilitres as there are litres in a volume. And if we wanted to go in the other direction, to get from a thousand down to one, we need to divide by a thousand.

Now the question wants the answer in litres, so I’m gonna put an extra column on our table and then I’m gonna convert all of the volumes into litres and then we can add up all of those volumes.

So two hundred and ninety-three millilitres, to convert that into litres, I’m going to need to divide by a thousand. So that’s nought point two nine three litres. Four hundred and fifty-four is millilitres, to convert that into litres again, I’m gonna need to divide by a thousand. So that’s nought point four five four litres. And water we were given in litres anyway, so that’s one point one.

Now just to make it easier to do the adding up and to keep track of things I’m gonna put, we’ve got zero in the hundredths column and zero in the thousandths column there.

Let’s do that adding up then. Three plus four plus zero is seven. Nine plus five plus zero is fourteen, so that’s four and we’re gonna carry one over to the next column. Two and four is six and one is seven and the extra one is eight, so eight. And zero and zero and one are just one. So one point eight four seven litres. So there we have our answer: she drinks one point eight four seven litres of liquid in total.