Question

A car tire is worn to 1/16th of an inch. How many centimeters is that?

Answer 1

It is 0.15875 cm.

You can get this in numerous different ways, but whichever way you use you must first know how many centimetres there are in an inch.

And if you look it up, you'll find that is about 2.54 cm in an inch.

Now you can do a couple of things. You can either set up a proportion like:

`1` inch : `2.54` cm as `1/16` inches : `x` cm

and then solve for `x`:

`x = 2.54(1/16) = 0.15875`cm

Or you could use a conversion factor:

`1/16`inch x `2.54/1`

which gives you the same answer of 0.15875 cm

Just as a little tip when using conversion factors, when you convert to a smaller quantity, it will always go on the top of your factor, and when you're converting into a larger quantity, it will always go on the bottom.

Hope that helped :)