5.1 Introduction and key concepts (EMG4G)

Knowing how to measure length, weight, volume and temperature is a skill that you will use often in a variety of different contexts. For example, you may want to know how far you've travelled in a car, how much baking powder you need to put in a cake, how long a tablecloth needs to be to cover a table, how big you can make a vegetable garden or how hot your oven at home must be to cook dinner.

As we have already seen in Chapter 3, measurements are useful for planning activities and projects like cooking, baking and gardening. Knowing what quantities we need allows us to calculate how much we need to complete the task at hand. It also means we can calculate how much we can or will have to spend on the items we need. We would not want to buy insufficient quantities of goods and we would not want to buy too much either (that would be wasteful and unnecessarily expensive!) It is therefore important that we measure our quantities so that we know exactly how much we need and can plan our finances accordingly.

In this chapter we will learn how to:

• estimate measurements
• use different measuring instruments to accurately measure:
  • length and distance
  • weight or mass
  • volume, and
  • temperature
• calculate the cost of materials based on quantity and a given price, whilst including the conversions we learnt in Chapter 3.