Expert: Sherry Wallin - 1/27/2009

Question
hi i did you to show me how to get feet to miles

Answer
Hi Jackie~
    It would help if I was given a particular problem but here I can make one up. Let's change 2,640 feet into miles. You know (or if you don't know you need to know that the conversion for feet to miles is 5,280 ft in every mile). Set up a multiplication problem where what unit you start with is on one side of the equals sign and what unit you want to end up with is on the other side of the equal sign.
In this case we have feet needing to be miles:

 1 mile
---------- x 2,640 feet = ?
5,280 feet

The trick here is that not only do 2640 and 5280 have factors in common you have feet in the numerator and feet in the denominator that cancel out as well, so now you have:

              1     1
1 mile x --- = --- mile
              2     2

Math Prof