Chemistry Units and Ratios, Part 3 - The Metric System

Greetings,

This post is a focus on the metric system.  The metric system uses base units of the SI System and defines prefixes to represent multiples of and fractions of the base units.  The base units represent a single (or unit) measure of a basic property of matter.  The common base units used in chemistry are meter (m), liter (L), gram (g), and mole (mol); which correspond to the fundamental properties of length, volume, mass, and amount, respectively.  The following graphic is a summary of the metric system prefixes and their fraction/multiple values.

The most commonly used units in the chemistry laboratory are the centimeter (cm), gram (g), milligram (mg), liter (L), milliliter (mL), mole (mol), and millimole (mmol).  The list of commonly used laboratory units comes from the fact that they correspond to the most convenient amounts of materials measured in the laboratory.  For example, mass amounts of chemicals weighed out in the chemistry laboratory commonly range from 50 mg to 50 g.  It would not make sense to think of those mass amounts in terms of kilograms (kg)!

My next post will explore some commonly used combinations of metric units in the chemistry laboratory.  Thank you for reading!


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