Section 35.4 Closing Ideas
Understanding how to manipulate units is an important skill for science courses, but these types of conversions happen all the time in ways that you might not expect. For example, if you have $10 and a plate of 3 street tacos costs $2.50, you can convert $10 to 4 plates of tacos, and 4 plates of tacos to 12 individual street tacos. You probably won't need to write out the conversion factors, and that's okay. Remember that the goal is to understand what unit conversions do and how they work. The goal is not that you would learn that math is a set of rules you must follow.
This example may seem intuitive, but that intuition comes with familiarity and experience. Even though you may not have found a 3 street tacos for $2.50 deal, you understand how it works. If you have an intuitive sense for how these conversions work and you understand how unit manipulations work, then it's not as difficult to solve problems in situations where you have less familiarity.
Every now and then, there's an internet math meme that shows up that is an example of unit conversions gone wrong. Here is one example:
"The winner of the next lottery will win $1300 million. There are 300 million people in the US.
Why not just give everyone $4.33 million?"
Can you spot the error? (Hint: Think about we have manipulated units in fractions throughout this entire section.)