Video Transcript
Which of the following is the liter a unit for measuring? Length, time, temperature, or capacity.
Let’s go through our four possible answers. Length is the way we measure how long something is. There are lots of different units of measurement we could use to measure length. One of them rhymes with liter — meter. We also have kilometers, centimeters, and even units like inches or feet. But the liter is not a unit for measuring length.
What about time? One way to think about time is, is how long something takes, the duration of things. We can measure time in seconds, minutes, and hours. For longer periods of time, we use units like months or years. We don’t use liters for measuring time.
Temperature is what we use to measure how warm or cold something is. To measure temperature, we use degrees, either degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit. We don’t use liters to measure temperature.
There’s only one possible answer left: capacity. Capacity is what we use to measure how much something can hold. We often use capacity to measure liquids. Think for a moment about a carton of orange juice, the sort of carton that you might find in a shop or in a kitchen cupboard. There’s a number on here that tells us how much it holds. And it might be the number one. But after the number one, we have a letter. And that letter we often see on cartons is L. It tells us that the carton of orange juice contains one liter. Units of measurement that we can use to measure capacity are things like liters and milliliters. So, we can use a liter as a unit for measuring how much liquid something can hold.
We can say then that a liter is a unit for measuring capacity.
