Video Transcript
Write two milliliters in
liters.
In order to convert between these
two metric units of milliliters and liters, we’ll need to remember that there’s 1000
milliliters in one liter. This means if we’re given a
quantity in milliliters and we need to change it into liters, we need to divide by
1000. It would be very tempting with a
value of two to think that we need to multiply by 1000 to give us a value of
2000. However, we need to divide by
1000.
If we write our value of two into a
place value grid, then it would be in the position of the ones column. We should remember that when we’re
dividing by 1000, we need to move all of our digits three places to the right. This means that the two will now be
in the thousandths column. But we also need to ensure that we
include our placeholder zeros. Therefore, two divided by 1000
gives us a value of 0.002.
It’s often helpful to think
logically if this would be a correct value for the answer. If we remember that a small spoon
or teaspoon is roughly five millimeters and we consider this quantity of two
milliliters on the spoon, then if we were to take a one-liter bottle and pour this
quantity of two milliliters into the one liter, then there’d only be a tiny amount
in the bottle. This amount of two milliliters is
going to be even smaller as a proportion of the larger unit of liters. We can, therefore, give the answer
that two milliliters is equal to 0.002 liters.
