Gram
In my daily life when I think of weight I mainly think of cooking. Of course I weigh myself which is a considerable amount more than a pinch of salt. I also think about medicine which demands tiny amounts. So to accomidate all let's think even smaller than a liter. What if we take just a milliliter (mL) of water and whatever it weighs will be our base unit for weight or better known as mass.
Reaching back into the Greek bag and pulling out gramma meaning a small weight, run it through English and we get a Gram. If you have a paperclip near by it about that amount.
If we take our liter of water that would weigh 1,000 grams or 1 kilogram (1kg). If we put there through our table like the other measures we get.
| Amount | Prefix | Measure | Abbreviation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| × | 1,000 | kilo | gram | kg |
| × | 100 | hecto | gram | hg |
| × | 10 | deka | gram | dag |
| gram | g | |||
| ÷ | 10 | deci | gram | dg |
| ÷ | 100 | centi | gram | cg |
| ÷ | 1,000 | milli | gram | mg |
Don't go building scales just yet. For our day to day life what we did above is perfect, but if someone needs to be more percise (such as building scales) we need to be even more percise. At different templatures water will have a different density. I'm talking about less than a gram between freezing and boiling.
It would be easy to shrug this off, but I think of folks that distribute medicine, or for larger weights this error could cause issues. So if we are going to do it. let's do it right. and for that we need a tempature system.