Video Transcript
Use less than, equals, or
greater than to fill in the blank. Seven square metres what 700
square decimetres.
In this question, we’re
comparing areas. We know that these are areas
because the units are squared. However, we can’t compare seven
and 700 directly since the square units are different. Let’s start by writing down a
length conversion that we already know that one metre is equal to 10
decimetres. This means that, to change from
metres to decimetres, we would multiply by 10. If we want to convert an area,
we can square the length conversion. This means that if we want to
change square metres into square decimetres, we would simply multiply by 10
squared, which is the same as multiplying by 100. This means that one square
metre is equal to 100 square decimetres.
So let’s take the seven square
metres in our question and change that into square decimeters. To do this, we would take our
value of seven and multiply it by 100, giving us 700 square decimetres. So if we look at the values in
our question, seven square metres and 700 square decimetres. Well, we’ve just shown that
seven square metres is equal to 700 square decimetres. So the missing symbol in the
question must be equals.