how to convert 1.6x10 3 dm to meters?

[ghowley]

I just started a chem class and I am stuck on how to convert measurements to meters. ghowley

[Knight]

I just started a chem class and I am stuck on how to convert measurements to meters. ghowley

In the SI system, any conversion is based on powers of ten. This makes useing scientific notation handy, because it too is based on powers of ten.
To convert 1.6 x 10 ^3 dm into meters, let's first figure out what a dm is. The NIST website at http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html has a great chart which shows the twenty SI prefixes, and their orders of magnitude.

For this we see that a dm is a decimeter, which is 1x10^-1 meters. That means that there are 10 decimeters per meter, or 0.1 meters per decimeter. Lets apply this to your problem

1.6 x 10 ^3 dm * 1 x 10^-1 m/dm = 1.6 x 10 ^ 2 m

or, to do this the hard way, lets convert 1.6 x 10 ^3 dm to standard notation, and work it that way....

1.6 x 10^3 dm = 1.6 x 1000 dm = 1,600 dm

1,600 dm x 0.1 m/dm = 160 m