And the question was asking us about femtoseconds, so we can see from our list that one femtosecond is 10 to the negative 15 seconds. As we can see, the last prefix on this list is femto-, which corresponds to 10 to the negative 15. Here is a list of the first five prefixes and associated powers of 10 for describing quantities that are smaller than those described by the base unit. And unfortunately, there is no way to derive which exponent corresponds to which prefix name, so memorization really is our only option. Unit prefixes are used all over physics, so it is worth memorizing them. And as we said before, to answer this question, we simply need to memorize which power of 10 corresponds to the prefix femto. So s is seconds and ms is milliseconds because the m stands for milli-, so mg would be milligrams, mm is millimeters, and so on. So five times 10 to the negative three seconds and five milliseconds represent exactly the same value of a physical quantity.Īs an aside, just like we represent units with single letters, we also represent prefixes with single letters. What we mean is that we can replace 10 to the negative three times a base unit with the prefix milli- attached to that base unit without changing the quantity and vice versa. It’s important to understand exactly what we mean when we write this equality. So when we say, for example, one millisecond, what we mean is one one thousandth of a second. For example, the prefix milli- corresponds to 10 to the negative three, or one one thousandth. In particular, almost all prefixes used in physics correspond to a power of 10 where the exponent is a multiple of three. That is, it’s a part of the word that comes before the main part.Īdding a prefix to a base unit is a shorthand way of expressing some number of that unit. We see then that femto- is a prefix for the base unit. Inside the word femtosecond, we see the word second, which is one of the base units we use in physics. But before we get to that, let’s understand qualitatively what we mean when we write something like one femtosecond. Now, the answer to this question is just a fact that we will need to memorize in one of two ways. In other words, how many seconds are in one femtosecond? All of our answer choices are numbers, and we are asked which of these numbers when multiplied by one second is equal to one femtosecond. #Match the prefix with the power of ten it represents. how to#This question is asking us about one femtosecond and specifically how to relate one femtosecond to one second. Which of the following is equal to one femtosecond when multiplied by one second? One times 10 to the 15, one times 10 to the negative 15, 10 times 10 to the nine, 0.1 times 10 to the negative nine, one times 10 to the negative 12.
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