What is length?
Length is the measure of the distance between any two points. That is, the length of a line is the distance between its endpoints. Similarly, the length of the side of an object is the distance between the two endpoints of the side being measured. Measuring the length of an object or an shape gives us an idea about its size.
How do we compare the length of multiple objects?
The length measurement of multiple objects can be compared using a common object. We can use objects like paper clips or colored tiles to compare lengths. In both cases, we can find the number of paper clips or colored tiles that can be placed until it covers the entire length of an object being measured.
What does shorter and longer mean?
Small objects have a shorter length when compared to larger objects. To measure the length of an object, we usually consider its longest side. If the length of an object along its longest side is smaller than the length of another object along its longest side, the first object is said to be shorter than the second object. Let us take a look at some examples.
From the above image, it is clear that the pencil is the longest object among the five objects. It is 9 paper clips long. On the other hand, the safety pin is the shortest object among them. It is only 2 paper clips long. We were able to make this conclusion easily by counting the number of paper clips, whose length adds up to the objects being measured.
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Solved Examples
Example 1: Which crayon is longer?
Solution: The green crayon is longer than the blue and red crayons. The blue crayon is the shortest crayon. The red crayon is longer than the blue crayon, but shorter than the green crayon.
Example 2: Sort the following colored lines from shortest to the longest.
Solution: We can sort these colored lines according to their length just by comparing them to each other.
The order of increasing length, that is the shortest to the longest, is green, blue and orange.
Example 3: Nancy’s bike is longer than Duke’s bike. George’s bike is longer than Duke’s bike, but it is shorter than Nancy’s bike. Sort the bikes in the decreasing order of their length.
Solution: We know that Nancy’s bike is longer than Duke’s bike and George’s bike. And we also know that Duke’s bike is shorter than George’s bike. So, the decreasing order of the length of the bike, that is longest to shortest, is:
Example 4: Find the length of these objects using paper clips.
Solution:
The spoon is 4 paper clips long, the knife is 6 paper clips long, and the chopsticks are 5 paper clips long.
Example 5: Your eraser is 2 color tiles long. Your friend’s eraser is 5 color tiles long. How many color tiles longer is your friend’s eraser?
Solution: Your friend’s eraser is 3 color tiles longer than your eraser.
Object B is longer than C but Object A is longer than B. So that means that Object A is longer than both Objects B and C. So Object A is longer than Object C.
We can use any object to measure length as long as we have a sufficient quantity to place the object along the length of the object being measured. It is important to note that these objects should be of uniform length. That is, if we are using paper clips to measure length, then all of those paper clips should be of the same length.
Evidently, it is not practical to measure the distance between two points on a piece of land using objects like paper clips and colored tiles. For these purposes, we can use bigger objects as references. People sometimes use the length of their feet or the length of their arms to measure these distances or even a measuring tape.