When converting from a small unit to a larger unit, move the decimal place to the left. When converting from a large unit to a smaller unit, shift the decimal point one digit to the right for each power of ten that your desired units differ from your initial units. Since two metric units always differ from each other by some multiple of ten, it's possible to make metric conversions simply by shifting your initial number's decimal point. Move the decimal point in your measurement. There are 1,000,000 centimeters in our 10 kilometer race.
A handy trick for remembering the basic metric prefixes is the mnemonic "King Henry Died Until Drinking Chocolate Milk," (or, if you prefer, "King Henry Doesn't Usually Drink Chocolate Milk").X Research source The most common of these prefixes, from "1,000 times larger" to "1,000 times smaller," are: In these cases, we add prefixes to the name of the unit to signify how much bigger or smaller it is than the base unit. In these cases, it's necessary to use units that differ from the base units by a power of 10 - in other words, measurements that are 10 times larger or smaller, 100 times larger or smaller, and so on.
These base units are sometimes either too small or too large to make practical measurements. The metric system has a variety of units of measurement - you have probably heard of meters (which measure distance) and grams (which measure mass), etc.