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Day 1,Class7, Ch:Motion and Time (Physics)
Today we talk about measurement.
Have you seen your mother putting every ingredient in cooking very carefully in a certain
amount …or sometimes when You're not well your parents touch your forehead to find out
whether you have fever or not, or at times..you are able to figure out that your school bag is
heavier or lighter from other days. Just by holding it . All this may not be accurate,but gives us a
fair idea .So this rough idea of how much is a quantity is called estimation
How much time you will take to complete your homework, and how much time will be left for
playing.
Pick another example. When your mother calls you for dinner. You say”10 more minutes
mother. I will finish my game and come.”Here also you estimate.
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In our daily life, we make measurements all the time to measure physical quantities
A carpenter measures the length of the table he is making;
a vegetable seller measures the mass of vegetables,
a person at a petrol pump measures the volume of petrol,
a doctor measures your body temperature when you are ill,
you measure time so that you reach school in time.
Time is measured in schools so that each period begins at fixed time. Thus,
measurements are important in our daily lives. Let's Take another example. How do you
verify that the new pair of pants is of correct size for you ?
For this you measure your length, right? So what is measurement? So by measurement you get
accurate dimension that Is length, breadth or height or exact capacity or quantity of an object
,even the distance travelled or the duration of a task or temperature of an object or a
substance .
As we know in a story the villager gave exact length of cloth for his new pants to be stitched and
he also measured it accurately using his hands, but when he got the pants stitched by the
Tailor: Goluram,it came out to be short.
Why was it so ? The villager used his hands to measure the length which was equal to three
hands ? But on the other side, at the shop, the tailor stitched the length of the pant equal to
thrice his hands .
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So where was the problem? The hand of the villager and that of Goluram were not of same size
So , what do we conclude from this incidence?
For consistency or accuracy of measurement the unknown quantity has to be measured using a
fixed quantity, not a varying quantity .Unknown quantity has to be measured with respect to
some fix quantity, this fix quantity against which an unknown quantity is measured is called a
unit.
You know in the olden days this was how the objects were measured using the different body
parts.
We no longer follow these units now a days. You must have understood very well. Why is it so?
It is so because the length of body parts vary from person to person and so these units are not
reliable, as for the same thing, different measurements are there when measured by different
people. People realised the need for some uniformity. As we saw even in the story, for
uniformity instead of varying length of hands ,new units were introduced: the length of the
cloth a fixed length is used. This was called metre. It was a unit against which unknown quantity
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of clothes where measured. Scientists all over the world have adopted a common
sets of units. This system adopted is called international system of units or SI Units. We will learn
more about them in the next class
Recapitulation
What is the difference between estimation and measurement and why measurement is
required and why we need standard units for measurement?
A physical quantity is that which can be measured directly or indirectly, Mass, length, time,
density, etc ,are some examples of the physical quantity
The measurement of unknown quantity can be done by comparing it with a standard quantity
of the same kind Thus, the comparison of an unknown quantity with a known quantity or
standard quantity is called measurement.
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