My daughter asked me to give her a definition of mass and matter. . How is mass different than weight?

Question

How would u explain this to a public school child.

What about volume? Please define in simple terms.

Answer 1

ha ha i just did a report on this.

take a pencil case. if you fill the pencil case with feathers it still weighs less then a pencil case with 4 pencils in it. the one with feathers in it has more mass. it shows how the weight does not affect the mass of something. mass is how much something takes up. take her room for example. if she had just her bed in it, it would have less mass then if it had a bed, desk, drawers, a light, etc...

hope you get through

Answer 2

When I was in middle school, I had a teacher that described it in a way I still remember... he was rather a fat man, and he knew it. He said "I don't have a weight problem. I have a mass problem. If we were on the moon [where there is less gravity] I would only weight --lbs." Just remember that mass is constant, weight is what the mass feels like when there is a force on it. Like, have you ever heard that when you are in a car accident and you are going x mph, your body will actually weight x lbs at impact.

Like everyone else said... matter is just stuff. Anything physical is made up of matter. Volume is how much space something takes up.

Answer 3

Tell her that mass is simply a measurement of all of the matter that is contained within her. Weight is a measure of the effect of gravity on a mass.

If she wants to find out her mass she can take her weight and divide it by 9.8

volume would be the amount of space an object occupies. That is the simplest way I can think of to express it.. To illustrate, imagine an empty room in your house. You have all of this empty space available to put stuff in.. So you put a couch into the room. Now you have less space to put stuff in. The space that the couch occupies is the volume of the couch.

Another illustration would be a coke can. You could give her a coke and say that the volume of this can is 12 ounces, and that number refers to the amount of fluid it can hold. When she drinks the coke, even if the can is empty the volume is still 12 ounces. The volume of a 20 gallon fish tank is 20 gallons. And so on..

I hope this helps!!

Answer 4

Mass is a property of a physical object that quantifies the amount of matter and energy it is equivalent to. Mass is a central concept of classical mechanics and related subjects, and there are several forms of mass within the framework of relativistic kinematics (see mass in special relativity and mass in General Relativity). In the theory of relativity, the quantity invariant mass, which in concept is close to the classical idea of mass, does not vary between single observers in different reference frames.

Weight is a term of measurement referring to either an object's mass or to the gravitational force acting on the object. Its exact meaning depends on the context in which it is used. The difference between these quantities is, historically, a relatively recent innovation, and the term "weight" continues to serve both purposes today. In the physical sciences, it is often narrowly defined to refer only to the force due to gravity, while in everyday discourse it is often used synonymously with mass. However, it should be emphasized that mass and gravitational force are quite dissimilar properties of a given object, despite being proportional to each other when the object is subject to non-zero gravitational acceleration.

Contents [hide]
1 Usage
2 Units of weight
3 Sensation of weight
4 Measuring weight
5 Relative weights on the Earth, Moon and planets
6 Body weight
6.1 Sports usage
7 See also

'Volume', also called capacity, is a quantification of how much space a certain region occupies. The international unit for volume is the cubic metre (American spelling: cubic meter).

The volume of a solid object is a numerical value given to describe the three-dimensional concept of how much space it occupies. One-dimensional objects (such as lines) and two-dimensional objects (such as squares) are assigned zero volume in the three-dimensional space.

Mathematically, volumes are defined by means of integral calculus, by approximating the given body with a large amount of small cubes or concentric cylindrical shells, and adding the individual volumes of those shapes. The generalization of volume to arbitrarily many dimensions is called content.[citation needed] In differential geometry, volume is expressed by means of the volume form.

Volume and capacity are sometimes distinguished, with capacity being used for how much a container can hold (with contents measured commonly in litres or its derived units), and volume being how much space an object displaces (commonly measured in cubic metres or its derived units).

Volume and capacity are also distinguished in a capacity management setting, where capacity is defined as volume over a specified time period.

Volume is a fundamental parameter in thermodynamics and it is conjugate to pressure.

Conjugate variables
of thermodynamics
Pressure Volume
Temperature Entropy
Chem. potential Particle no.



Contents [hide]
1 Volume formulae
2 Volume measures: USA
3 Volume measures: UK
4 Volume measures: cooking
5 Relationship to density
6 Volume comparisons
7 See also
8 External links



[edit]
Volume formulae
Common equations for volume:
Shape Equation Variables
A cube: s = length of a side
A rectangular prism: l = length, w = width, h = height
A cylinder (circular prism): r = radius of circular face, h = distance between faces
Any prism that has a constant cross sectional area along the height**: A = area of the base, h = height
A sphere: r = radius of sphere
which is the first integral of the formula for Surface Area of a sphere
An ellipsoid: a, b, c = semi-axes of ellipsoid
A pyramid: A = area of base, h = height from base to apex
A cone (circular-based pyramid): r = radius of circle at base, h = distance from base to tip
Any figure (calculus required) h = any dimension of the figure, A(h) = area of the cross-sections perpendicular to h described as a function of the position along h
this will work for any figure (no matter if the prism is slanted or the cross-sections change shape).

The volume of a parallelepiped is the absolute value of the scalar triple product of the subtending vectors, or equivalently the absolute value of the determinant of the corresponding matrix.

The volume of any tetrahedron, given its vertices a, b, c and d, is (1/6)·|det(a−b, b−c, c−d)|, or any other

Answer 5

Mass - Measure of the gravitational force [the force that keeps you on the earth] on something. I dont know how to explain gravitational force in more simple words.

Matter - How many little things are in an object [atoms]

Answer 6

Matter is what a physical object is composed of

Mass vs Weight:
Weight accounts for gravity. Check out this website, it's in 'english'
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Gene_Nygaard/weight.htm

Volume if is a quantification of how much space a certain region occupies

Answer 7

oh i am learning that right now in sciencce

well matter is what the world is made up of basically it is anything that has mass and volume

mass is the amount of matter in an object and it is constant

hope this helps i am doing a project on it right now Lol

Answer 8

In my humble opinion, the best thing you can do is this:
Go to Google and the search window, type this exactly:

define:mass

Most of the definitions will have something to do with church, but almost all are academic quality.

do the same with any word

Have fun!

Answer 9

mass is the weight of an object

matter is anything that takes up /occupies space

Answer 10

Matter is stuff.

Mass is how much stuff.

Weight is how hard the stuff is to lift.

Volume is how much space the stuff takes up.