Fill in the Blanks. \(7200 \mathrm{~s}\) 2 hour \(=2 \times 60\) minutes \(=2 \times 60 \times 60 \mathrm{~s}=7200 \mathrm{~s}\)

Understanding the different units of time is foundational in managing our daily activities, and it's crucial for various calculations. The most common time units include seconds (s), minutes (m), and hours (h), with each unit being a multiple of the one before it.

There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. This hierarchical structure makes conversions between these units a matter of simple multiplication or division. For more granular measurements, time can even be broken down into milliseconds (ms), microseconds (μs), and nanoseconds (ns), whilst longer spans of time are quantified in days, weeks, months, and years.

Converting hours to minutes is a basic time conversion that can be done with a simple arithmetic operation. Since each hour contains 60 minutes, to convert hours into minutes, you multiply the number of hours by 60.

For example, if we convert 2 hours to minutes:

• 2 hours × 60 minutes/hour = 120 minutes

You can use this calculation for any number of hours you want to convert. It’s helpful for timing events, scheduling, and even anticipating how long a trip will take.

Once you've converted hours to minutes, you might need to drill down even further to convert minutes to seconds. This is another straightforward conversion: multiply the number of minutes by 60, since each minute is comprised of 60 seconds.

For instance, from the previous conversion we have 120 minutes. To get the number of seconds:

• 120 minutes × 60 seconds/minute = 7200 seconds

Understanding this conversion is particularly useful in contexts such as sports timing, scientific experiments, and even cooking recipes where precision is important.

Basic arithmetic operations, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, are essential in converting units of time. Multiplication is used, as we've seen, to convert a larger unit of time to a smaller unit (e.g., hours to minutes, minutes to seconds), while division is used for the inverse. Being comfortable with these operations enables you to accurately and efficiently perform time conversions and apply them in practical scenarios.

For each step of the conversion, you only need to remember the number of the smaller units in the larger unit (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour) and either multiply or divide accordingly, depending on the direction of your conversion.