Question

A blue whale has a length of 28,578 millimeters. What is the length of a blue whale in kilometers? Show your work below by writing the conversion factors you use to solve this problem

Answer 1

Mm to km move decimal over 6 places to the left
28,578.
0.028578 is your anwer

Answer 2

Milli word means 1/1000 times while kilo word means 1000 times. That means a milli meter will be equal to 1/1000 meter while 1 kilometer is equal to 1000 meters. The conversion factor would be: 1 millimeter * (1 meter/1000millimeter) / (1000 meters/1 kilometer)= 1 * 10^-6 kilometer. The conversion factor is 1 * 10^-6 kilometer/mm

Since 1 mm equal to 1 * 10^-6 kilometer, the whale length would be:28,578 millimeters * (1 * 10^-6 kilometer/mm)= 0.028578 km= 2.85 * 10^-2 km