Introduction
Welcome to the first week of Succeed with maths – Part 2. The first two weeks of this course will focus on measurement and the units that are used to communicate this.
People use numbers to solve a wide variety of different problems, including when designing buildings, navigating and working out the fuel consumption of an aircraft. These examples all use measurements that involve distance and it is these types of situations this week will be concentrating on. For this, it is important that you have a working knowledge of various units of measurement and the two different measurement systems used in the UK – The Système Internationale (SI) or International System, on which the metric system is based, and imperial. Both of these will be covered over the next two weeks, and this week will look in particular at measuring length.
Watch the course author Maria Townsend introduce Week 1:
After this week’s study, you should be able to:
- understand how the International System (SI) is formulated
- understand the more common SI units for length and convert between them
- recognise the more common imperial units for length and convert between these
- understand how the SI and imperial units of length relate to each other.
If you haven’t seen Succeed with maths – Part 1 yet and would like to study this first please follow the link: Succeed with maths – Part 1 .
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.
OpenLearn - Succeed with maths – Part 2 
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