A student skipped a step when she tried to convert 26 hours into seconds and she got the following incorrect result: 26 hours (60 seconds/1 minute)=1560 seconds

Question

What conversion ratio did she skip in this multiple-step conversion?

1 minute/60 seconds
60 seconds/1 hour
60 seconds/1 minute
1 hour/60 minutes

Answer 1

The student skipped the conversion ratio of 60 minutes/1 hour.

To correctly convert 26 hours into seconds, the full conversion process involves the following steps:

1. Convert hours to minutes: 26 hours × (60 minutes/1 hour) = 1560 minutes
2. Convert minutes to seconds: 1560 minutes × (60 seconds/1 minute) = 93600 seconds

The student only performed the first multiplication concerning seconds per minute, thus skipping the necessary step of converting hours to minutes.