--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, "Blessman, Phil" <Phil.Blessman_at_C...> wrote: >> Doesn't "kilo" mean "thousand" so their answer was really "one thousand >> gram"? Anyway, "one kilogram" is the mass of one liter of water at 4 deg >> C (and only then, BTW) so I would hope that this answer was acceptable. In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, sfs98ud99 wrote: >Kilogram means "one thousand grams" in Greek rather than English - >while College Bowl is considering holding their Region XVI tourney in >Athens next year, Science Bowl has never done so. Not to start a "nerd" war, but technically kilo means "1000" in English, and NOT in Greek. The Greek term for "1000" is actually something like "khlioi" in Latin script, whereas my trusted online (English) American Heritage Dictionary gives the definition of: kilo- pref. One thousand (10^3): kilowatt. [French, from Greek khlioi, thousand. See gheslo- in Indo-European Roots.] Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Retrieved form the www on 9/18/03 from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=kilo Anyway, I hope my point gets across: "One thousand grams" and "One kilogram" are the same thing, they are interchangeable in every day usage as well as scientific usage, neither one is necessarily easier to understand (it's not like they answered "A trillion nanograms"), their answer didn't "lack" anything (such as when a questions asks for the answer to be rounded to 2 digits, and the team doesn't), and in general making a distinction between the two answers is plain silly. There is no good reason to distinguish between these answers... Let me give a counter example demonstrating (I believe) how silly this is: Question: "Rounding to one significant figure, how many seconds does it take light to travel one foot in a vacuum?" Answer: "One nanosecond." Is that wrong? Would it have been "righter" to answer "0.000000001 seconds"? Too much of a response to a silly issue, I apologize... I guess I got carried away. Thanks for listening, Phil Conserve School Quiz Bowl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:47 AM EST EST