Question #ac0f8

1 Answer
Jan 27, 2015

So, you're dealing with a unit conversion that must get you from "cL"cL, or centiliters, to "nL"nL, or nanoliters.

One centiliter is equal to 10^(-2)"L"102L, and one nanoliter is equal to 10^(-9)"L"109L, so you're going from something small to something even smaller. This means that the result must be a bigger number than 35.7, since there are more nanoliters in a liter than there are centiliters in a liter.

You can do this by going to liters first

"35.7 cL" * ("1 L")/(10^2 "cL") * (10^9"nL")/("1 L") = 35.7 * 10^(7)"nL"35.7 cL1 L102cL109nL1 L=35.7107nL

or by going directly from centiliters to nanoliters

"35.7 cL" * ("1 nL")/(10^(-7)"cL") = 35.7 * 10^(7)"nL"35.7 cL1 nL107cL=35.7107nL

Because 1 liter has 10^2102 centiliters and 10^9109 nanoliters, one centiliter will have

"1 cL" * ("1 nL")/(10^(-7)"cL") = 10^7"nL"1 cL1 nL107cL=107nL

Unit conversions like this one will become a walk in the park once you'll get comfortable with the SI metric prefixes

![http://www.ambrsoft.com/GeneralCalc/SIprefix.aspx](useruploads.socratic.org)