Let's Learn English! Topic: Measurements 📏📐🌡️ (Lesson Only)

Well, hello, and welcome to

this English lesson about measurements.

I want to be clear that this is

an English lesson and not a science lesson.

Most of what I say will be perfectly correct when

it comes to speaking English and talking about measurements.

But I don't want to get into any debates about

weight versus mass or whether you should use milliliters or

teaspoons when making a cake using a recipe.

So once again, welcome to

this English lesson about measurements.

I'm sure you will enjoy, enjoy it.

I will talk not only about the units of measure, but

I will talk about the things we use to measure.

Different things like distance and

time and all of those.

I'll save time for the end because I

think those are the simplest, but we'll definitely

cover everything you can think of.

Well, pretty close to everything you can think of

when it comes to measuring things in the world

around us, whether you're trying to measure how fast

your car is going or how far you can

jump, we will talk about that today.

So once again, welcome to

this English lesson about measurements.

So the English verb when you want

to measure something is to measure.

I'm using the definition to define it.

If I want to know how long to cut

a piece of wood, I would measure it. Okay.

If I wanted to know how much

something weighs, though, I would weigh it.

Even though you're still measuring it, we would

probably say that you're going to weigh it.

If I wanted to figure out how fast

someone is running, I would probably time them.

But these are all ways to measure something.

It's the way to get a number that

represents the speed or the weight or the

length or the distance or the time.

There are a lot of different things that

we will measure in the world, but the

general term would be to measure.

Give me 1 second here.

I just have to do one small thing.

I don't have my slides on my other screen.

There they are. Good.

So we're going to start by talking about quantity.

So when you measure the quantity of something, the first

thing I think of is if you are going to

make something in the kitchen, you need different quantities of

different ingredients in order to make something.

One way to get those different

quantities would be to weigh things.

But in my part of the world, because

I'm just an amateur cook or baker, I

generally just measure things and determine quantity.

So I don't weigh my flour or my sugar.

I actually use things like this.

This is a teaspoon.

Now, there are two kinds of teaspoons.

In my kitchen, there's a teaspoon that I just grabbed from

the drawer to put sugar in my coffee and stir it.

And this is not a teaspoon

that you use to measure things.

But in my cupboard I have measuring spoons,

like the one that's closest to me here.

And this measuring spoon is exactly one teaspoon.

I actually think it's close to 5 ML.

I'm not going to get into that, though.

It's not a science lesson.

I'm not going to convert.

But when I make something and it says to

put in two teaspoons of yeast or two teaspoons

of sugar, I will grab this teaspoon, the one

closest here, and use that to measure that quantity.

So I'm putting the right amount in.

We also have something called a tablespoon.

Now, if you go to my kitchen, if you

look at the far picture, that person is holding

a tablespoon, it's slightly bigger than a teaspoon.

And we would probably use it to eat

soup or something like that, or to scoop

ice cream if you want really big scoops.

But if I was making something and it

said to put in two tablespoons of olive

oil, I would use this close spoon here.

This is a measuring spoon and

it is exactly one tablespoon.

Also, please notice the short form.

TSP is short for teaspoon and

Tbsp is short for tablespoon.

You don't want to get those confused, especially

if you're putting salt in a recipe.

If it says one teaspoon of salt and you put in

one tablespoon of salt, it's not going to taste very good.

We also use what's called a cup.

So again, in the far picture, you see a cup,

a generic term for something we drink out of.

I have a cup of water here, but this

cup, I don't think this is exactly one cup.

If I was making a loaf of bread and if it

said to put in four cups of flour, I would use

this measuring cup, the silver one that's closest to me.

This is exactly one cup.

So if the quantity of flour for the loaf of

bread is four cups of flour, I would use this

precise measuring cup to put the right amount in.

And then, of course, we do also

measure quantity in milliliters and liters.

Now, I know there are more measurements

than just milliliter and liter, but generally

those are the ones we use.

When I buy milk, it comes in a four liter bag.

So that four liter bag has smaller bags in it.

Each bag is a little bit more than a liter.

When we measure something, if it says

it needs one cup of flour.

I'm pretty sure that's the same as 250 flour.

So we do sometimes use more precise

measurements than just teaspoon, tablespoon and cup.

Sometimes we actually use milliliter and liter.

And I'm sure there's things like decaliters and stuff like

that, but those are not commonly used in my part

of the world, at least when measuring stuff.

And yes, in my part of Canada, not in the whole country,

but in my part of Canada, you buy milk in bags.

It comes in a four liter bag.

And then you have this special little pitcher here to put

the milk bag in in order to use your milk.

Let's talk about length and distance.

So length and distance are really the same thing.

It just depends how much you're measuring.

So if I measure a piece of

wood, I would measure the length.

But if I measure how far it is from here

to my neighbor's house, I would then call it distance.

Okay, so I always think of it this way.

Length is related to things, you know,

what's the length of your desk?

What's the.

I don't.

I have to be careful here because

we also have width as well.

But when you're measuring something,

generally we're measuring the length.

If I'm trying to figure out how far is it

from here to work, then I would use distance.

But we use a variety of things to measure those two.

Probably the most common thing in

a school would be a ruler.

Ruler is usually 30 cm or 1ft, depending

on what unit of measures you are using.

And I'll talk about that in a bit.

But most students will have a ruler and they'll sometimes

they have a smaller ruler that's only this long, like

15 cm because it fits in their pencil case.

But they will use that ruler to measure things, but they

will also use that ruler just to make straight lines.

So if you use your pencil and a ruler,

you can make a straight line with it.

So a ruler is a small wood or plastic device, I

guess that is has the units of measure on one side

or both, and you use it to measure length.

Most rulers in Canada, by the way, have

metric on one side, and then they have

what we call imperial on the other side.

So if I wanted to know how many centimeters

something was, or how many inches it was, I

just use a different side of the ruler.

We also have what are called

tape measures or measuring tapes.

I thought this was funny last night because

I didn't actually realize we had two names.

I've used both these names.

Both are very common.

When you build something, you usually use a tape

measure to measure things, especially if you need to

cut something with a saw or with a scissors.

But you could also use a measuring tape.

I could say to jen, have you seen the tape measure?

Or I could say, have you seen the measuring tape?

They mean the same thing.

Um, I'm not sure why we have

two completely different names, but we do.

So I guess that's just how English is.

Sometimes we decide we need two names for something.

So, um, I always lose my measuring tape, by the way.

Sometimes I use my tape measure somewhere and then I

leave it in a funny spot somewhere on the farm,

and then a couple months later, I can't find it.

So I not even sure which did I use

tape measure or measuring tape when I gave that

example, I think I might have used both.

Yeah, I don't even know why I

use one over the other, but tape

measure and measuring tape, meter stick, yardstick.

So we do have to clear

something up here, and that's that.

I am canadian.

When I spell metre, it ends in re.

If you were in the United States, you

could spell it m e t e r.

But in my country, a meter stick,

this is how we would spell it.

And then you also could call it a yardstick.

It's really just a big ruler.

You probably will only find one of these in a classroom

or in a place where they work with paper or clothing.

It is a long wooden stick.

In Canada, a meter stick and a yardstick are actually

the same thing because 1 meter and 3ft are very

close in length, they're not exactly the same.

So generally, one side of our meter stick will be in

meters and the other side will be in feet and inches.

So, by the way, a yard is 3ft.

So you might have a yardstick or a meter stick.

It simply refers to a really, really, for lack

of a better word, a really big ruler.

Very common in classrooms.

Most classrooms will have a meter stick or yardstick,

so the teacher can easily measure things or draw

straight lines on the blackboard or whiteboard.

A measuring wheel, this is more common, I would say,

either on a construction site or you might see one

of these at a track and field meet.

This is something that you push.

And as the wheel turns for every rotation, it measures 1

meter or half a meter or 2ft, whatever it's set to.

And so you'll see there's a

little gray box on the bottom.

You would set that to zero, and then you

would put the wheel down and you would walk.

And as the wheel goes around, I think it

even clicks, like click, click, click, click, click.

And every time it makes one rotation, it

adds that to the number on the screen.

So if you wanted to, let's say you had to put lines

on a soccer field, you would probably use this to measure.

So it's the correct number of meters or feet.

A measuring wheel, and then.

I've never used one of these.

But you can measure distance with lasers.

So you could have a laser distance meter.

You could point it at a wall and push

the button and it would shine a laser and

measure a little bit of the reflected laser.

And then it knows how long it took and then

it can figure out how far away that wall is.

That would be pretty cool.

I would love to try that sometime.

I think that's how they measure how

far the moon is from the earth.

I think they can use lasers for that.

Again, this is not a science lesson.

This is an English lesson.

So a couple of things.

We're going to talk about the metric

system quickly and the imperial system.

So in the metric system, we are going

to measure distances based on the meter.

A meter is about.

I try to get it on my screen

is about, that's half a meter here.

Let's do this.

A meter is about this long.

You can measure this at home if

you think I'm correct or not.

With the metric system, everything is then based

on whether it's part of a meter or

whether it's bigger than a meter.

So a millimeter is very, very tiny.

A centimeter is a little bit bigger.

A meter is what I showed you.

And a kilometer is a measure of distance.

Like I live, I think, 20

something kilometers from my sister.

Okay, so if I was to drive there, it's 20 km.

So we base our system of measurement

in the metric system on the meter.

And again, you can spell these ending in er instead

of re if you are in the United States.

But here I would use that spelling.

So millimeter, very, very tiny.

The imperial system, this is what we

call it, an alternate system of measurement,

uses inches and it uses the foot.

This is about a foot.

A yard is 3ft, and I don't even know what

a mile is, like 1600ft or something like that.

Again, not a science lesson, but

an inch is about this big.

A foot is about this big.

By the way, an inch is 2.5, is 30 cm.

So those are rough conversions.

But if you were in the United States, you

would be measuring things in feet and inches.

Notice when I.

It's like 1ft or 3ft.

You have to switch the word a little bit.

When I measure things, I measure in

feet, by the way, and inches.

And if you want to go smaller

than an inch, you use fractions.

So half an inch, quarter inch, 8th of an inch.

If you want to measure extreme distances in space,

you would use what's called a light year.

A light year is the distance

light will travel in one year.

So this is a way to

measure really, really, really long distances.

I think there's something called

an astronomical unit as well. Is that.

Yeah, I don't know a lot about that.

So again, English lesson.

Not a science lesson, but a light year.

You might hear if you watch a science fiction

show that something is, you know, seven light years

away, which means it would take seven years at

the speed of light to get to that place.

So let's talk about speed.

This is my least favorite thing to

see, especially if I'm driving too fast.

But when you measure speed, you're

measuring how fast something is going.

If I throw a baseball, I can measure

how many kilometers per hour or how many

miles per hour that ball is going.

Now, if you are driving your car, you do

not want to be going over the speed limit.

You don't want to be going too fast, because

if a police officer uses a radar gun to

measure your speed, you will get a ticket.

So in a car, the speedometer will measure your speed.

Now, there's a funny thing here, actually.

I think I have slides on this. Let me see.

Where are my slides?

Yeah, I'll talk about that in a sec.

So when you start driving, the speedometer goes up.

And this is a little bit weird for me.

It measures your speed, but it's a speedometer.

So even though it has the word speed

in it, it's not pronounced the same way.

So it's a speedometer. Speedometer.

You barely say the first little bit speedometer.

And then in Canada, our speedometers have kilometers

per hour and miles per hour on them.

So just in case we go to the United

States, we know how fast we are going.

That might be common everywhere in the world.

I'm not sure.

Um, so here's an interesting thing.

If you drive, it's measured in kilometers per hour.

You will sometimes hear people say kilometers an hour.

How many kilometers an hour were you doing?

Technically, that's incorrect, but in informal

English, people will say that.

They will say I was doing 120 km/hour

or I was doing 120 km an hour.

Both would be correct in conversation, but

the real term is kilometers per hour.

Short forms are both there.

In Canada we use the km h, but kph

could be used as well for kilometers per hour.

By the way, I don't know anywhere in

Canada where this is the speed limit.

That's pretty high.

I think 110 km/hour is the fastest I have ever seen.

And then if you are in the United States,

you might see miles per hour, short form, mph.

And again, you might hear someone say, how

many miles an hour was he going?

He was going 60 miles an hour.

So in informal English, again, you can use

miles an hour instead of miles per hour,

but the correct term is miles per hour.

And again, we're measuring this.

This is how many kilometers you would go in

1 hour if you kept driving that speed.

So if I'm driving 100 km/hour then if I drove for an

hour, I would then have gone the distance of 100 km.

Temperature.

I'm not sure if you can see this slide, but

you can see it's going to be seven degrees today.

I can hardly see the slide.

Let me put my glasses on.

It's a little blurry.

Eight degrees to nine degrees tomorrow.

Eight degrees tomorrow. Eight degrees.

It looks nice, but look at the nighttime temperature.

It's going to be minus five degrees celsius.

So then, as you know, temperature is a

measure of how hot or cold it is.

There's probably a far more scientific description.

But generally in everyday life, we're talking about, well,

how, how warm is it going to be today?

It's going to be eight degrees today.

That little symbol on this thermometer, the little

circle is the sign we use for degrees.

So wherever this is, it's 28 degrees celsius.

For me, that would be very warm.

For some of you, that might actually be somewhat cool.

That might be a nice day for you.

And again, I said thermometer a couple of times.

A thermometer is a device we use to

measure how warm or cold it is.

Okay, so I have a thermometer outside.

I can go outside and see what the thermometer says.

We have a thermometer in our house that tells us how

warm or cold it is in our house as well.

But a thermometer is just a nice device to have.

There's a number of different kinds.

This is one you would put outside or on a wall.

You can also get a thermometer that checks

the temperature in your ear or in your

mouth or under your armpit if you're feeling

sick and you need to take your temperature.

And then there are also

two ways to measure temperature.

We use Celsius in Canada, but

you could also use Fahrenheit.

Most thermometers that you buy in

Canada will have both on there.

They will measure in Fahrenheit as well as Celsius.

You can see this one.

The large letters are Fahrenheit and

the small letters are Celsius.

So you can see it looks like it's about 20 1 celcius.

So with my simple conversion, that would be

21 is 42 plus there is 72 fahrenheit.

So it's not an accurate conversion, but

enough to know what to wear.

Um, if I needed, like, if I needed

to know what the temperature was in fahrenheit.

So again, Celsius, pretty common, as in the

metric system, water boils at 100 degrees celsius.

Water freezes at zero degrees celsius. Fahrenheit.

A little harder to understand, sometimes 32

degrees and 212 degrees fahrenheit or something.

Again, not a science lesson.

And then we're going to talk about weight.

Yeah, let's start talking about weight

and then we'll do some questions.

I don't want to get into

the difference between weight and mass.

Weight has to do with gravity, mass has

to do with the size of the object.

Again, let's talk more about how

we use these words in English.

Weight, then, is how heavy something is.

The more something weighs, the heavier it

is, the harder it is to lift.

When something doesn't weigh very much, it's

very light and easy to lift.

So sometimes we want to measure how heavy something is.

Grapes and a lemon probably don't weigh very much,

but other things do weigh quite a bit.

We use a scale generally to measure weight.

So you might have a bathroom scale.

You step on the scale and

it tells you you're 197 pounds.

Or maybe it tells you that you're 90 kg.

We use a scale, 90 kg.

I'm not sure what that is in pounds.

That might be a bad example.

What do you do anyways?

A scale is what you use to measure it.

You might have a small scale in your kitchen.

Instead of using teaspoons and tablespoons and cups.

You might like to measure your ingredients by

weight, which is supposed to be more accurate.

But the thing you would use is called a scale.

And then we measure in kilograms

or we measure in pounds.

So we have weights for working out.

Our weights are all in pounds.

They look like this on the end.

They say ten lb or 20 lb.

If I lived in a country where you only had

the metric system, they would probably be in kilograms.

Short form is kg.

The reason our weights are in pounds is because

the vast majority of our fitness equipment is from

the United States or made for the north american

market and therefore they are labeled.

Their weight is in pounds because that's just, you

know, most fitness shows I watch, if it's from

the United States, it will obviously be in pounds,

but if it's in Canada, it will as well.

If I was to watch, you know, a youtuber

from Europe, it would more likely be in kilograms.

So KG is short for kilograms.

Don't know why LB is short for pounds, but

that is the short form for four pounds.

So ten pound weights, pretty light for me.

A 50 pound weight is very heavy for me.

I'm not sure where you are in your fitness world,

but that's, that's how I feel about those two weights.

The rest of the lesson is going to go

fast because we're going to talk about time.

And I have a lot of slides for time, but I'm

going to go really quickly because I think time is one

of the first things you learn when you learn a language.

When you learn a language, you generally learn colors,

articles of clothing, animals, like relatives, like mom, dad,

sister, brother, and you usually learn time.

So you usually learn things

like clock, watch, stopwatch, timer.

These are the ways we measure time.

Obviously, you know, a clock is on the wall.

We use a clock to tell time.

You have a watch on your wrist to tell time.

A stopwatch is generally used.

By the way, we don't use hourglasses

anymore unless you're playing a game.

Sometimes a board game will

come with a little hourglass.

That's what that is.

But a stopwatch you will see, like at

a track meet where people are running.

So a stopwatch starts at zero.

When you push the button, it records how much time

has passed until you push the button again, a timer,

you set it to the number of seconds or minutes

you want to time something and it goes down.

And when it hits zero, it beeps.

Okay, so the difference, a stopwatch goes up.

So when you click start, it

starts counting seconds and minutes.

A timer goes down.

Timers you usually find at like a kitchen or in a kitchen,

you put something in the oven and you set a timer.

Or if you go to a basketball game, the

timer goes down as the game goes along.

So again, units of measure.

Let's do this quickly.

You measure in seconds.

Things happen very quickly.

If I run 100 meters, it used to take me 13, 14 seconds.

It probably takes me 20 seconds.

Now we have minutes.

So seconds.

Minutes, I'm pluralizing hours.

A day is 24 hours long.

Well, the sun is up for not 24 hours, but from one day

to the next for the time it takes the earth to spin.

Once it takes 24 hours, and

then we have, of course, days.

The relations between them.

There are 60 seconds in a minute, there are 60

minutes in an hour, there are 24 hours in a

day, and there are 365 days in a year.

We also have months, so we

have twelve months in the year.

This is August 2020.

Not sure why I randomly chose

that month, but it's actually.

It's currently March, by the way.

It's almost April.

But a month is a unit of

measure for time over a longer period.

And then, of course, we have year and it's 2024.

So again, those are words.

If you are learning English that you've

probably learned a long time ago, you

may not be familiar with decades.

A decade is ten years, or century, which is 100 years.

You've probably heard them and most of

you might know them, but that would

be more units, measurements of time.