Question

1) A microbiologist measures the length of a bacterium of 0.000163 m and the

length of yeast as 0.0087 mm.

a) Which is longest? (Hint: Both must be the same units)

b) How much longer is the longer specimen than the shorter specimen?

Answer 1

a) The bacterium is longer;

b) The bacterium is 0.1543 mm longer than the yeast.

Explanation:

In order to compare the length of the two beings we need to convert them to the same unit. We can do it either way, but we'll choose to convert from meters to milimetres, since we're dealing with small numbers. To do that we need to multiply the length that is in "m" by 1000.

`length_(bac) = 0.000163*1000 = 0.163 \text{ mm}`

a) The bacteria is longer than the yeast.

b) We need to subtract their length in order to find this answer:

`\text{dif} = length_(bac) - length_(yeast)\\\text{dif} = 0.163 - 0.0087 = 0.1543 \text{ mm}`