Converting Minutes to Hours
One day while practicing playing the guitar you realize you have spent 2,160 minutes practicing in the last two weeks. You want to know how many hours you have been practicing, but how do you change time from minutes to hours? We know that there are 60 minutes in an hour so we will use that fact to help us find out how many hours you practiced. The unit rates we care about are
60 minutes1 hour
1 hour60 minutes
These are actually equal to each other. We call them proportions.
When converting different units of measurements, in this case minutes to hours, it is important to set up the ratios correctly. A trick to knowing if you set up the ratios correctly is to check if your units cancel each other out.
Treat the ratios exactly how you treat fractions. If you have the same thing in the numerator (top) and the denominator (bottom), they can cancel each other out. When setting up the ratios, begin with what you are being asked to convert. In this case, we will find the amount of hours that are in 2,160 minutes.
2,160 minutes×60 minutes1 hour=??? hours
Notice the units. Because there are minutes in the top and the bottom of the fractions, they cancel each other out. Since the only unit remaining in the left side of the equation is hours, we know we set the problem up correctly and can solve for the number of hours spent practicing.
Thus, 2,160 minutes=36 hours.