Do you ever notice that if ever you are out doing groceries you usually buy things by the pound, like a pound of meat for instance? However, do you also notice that you buy medicine and other stuff by the gram or kilogram? It is quite interesting that people use different measures of weight in everyday life. This also brings the necessity of converting pounds to kilograms at one time or another.
Defining a Pound of Something
Talking about the term ‘pound’, it can mean a lot of things. The word pound can refer to a unit of force, mass, or currency. Since we are dealing with converting pounds to kilograms we usually would think that we are referring to two units of weight. It will be quite surprising to some that we are not actually comparing two systems of measuring weight when dealing with kilograms and pounds.
What’s in a Kilo?
Many people buy stuff in terms of pounds but other countries and territories they refer to measures of weight in terms of kilos. So, if ever you’re visiting another country where kilos are in use instead of pounds you’ll have to figure out how to convert pounds to kilograms. However, do take note that converting from pounds to kilos isn’t an exact science. A pound is a unit of weight/force while a kilo is a unit of mass.
However, in practical everyday usage, people don’t really care if you’re conversion isn’t exact. Just use a weighing scale or a conversion calculator and that’s it. Nevertheless, it is quite an interesting thing to look into these two units of measurement.
Converting Pounds to Kilograms
People often ask how many pounds are there in one kilogram. The answer you will normally get when you ask that question is 2.2 pounds for ever kilo. However, a more exact conversion, doing the long bit of math, is 2.20462262185. Or, turning things around a bit, you have 0.45359237 of a kilogram in one pound. It is customary to round things off after one or two digits since not that many people are thrilled to see that many digits after the decimal point.
One pound of force is actually the equivalent of an objects mass multiplied by acceleration due to the Earth’s gravity, which is actually equal to 9.80665 m/s^2. One needs to understand this if you want to go over the basic rudiments of converting pounds to kilograms.
On the other hand, a kilogram is the mass SI base unit. In other words it is the standard unit to measure the mass of an object. In reality, you’re actually figuring out how many newtons there are in a kilogram since the SI weight unit is in newtons. So one way one might think to convert pounds to kilograms is to convert pounds to newtons then figure out how many newtons there are in a kilogram.