The common option for the evaluation of distances depends on the country and its traditions. Despite the fact, that there are standard units, many regions of the world got used to other variants. As they still stick to them, like Americans and British for miles, the need occurs to transform miles to km.
Let’s discover the ways to do this and get an accurate result without spending much time and effort. Actually, this can be done both manually and automatically, but first, one needs to understand what these units mean.
Different metric systems: what are kilometers and miles?
Kilometers belong to the metric system of length evaluation and are usually utilized for quite long distances. There are smaller standard units, such as millimeters, centimeters and meters. Centimeters correspond to 10 mm, 100 cm is equal to 1 m and 1000 m comprises a kilometer or km for short.
If one needs to understand the distance between towns or countries, kilometers are the best option for this. However, not everywhere due to the local traditions and preferences that are given to other options.
Coming to Great Britain or the USA, one often encounters miles. They were traditional for many regions of the world and had different meanings, but gradually metric units replaced them. Originally, miles come from the Roman Empire and corresponded to 1000 paces of a Roman legion. Later, statute and nautical miles appear that differ in value. Moreover, some countries preserve this unit and give it their own length.
Modern British and American statutory mile equals approximately 1609.34 meters or 1.60934 km. It is utilized not only for road lengths but also for speeds. Interestingly enough, many airline companies created their bonus programs based on this value. It is worth keeping in mind for the mile to kilometer transformations.
The transformation of mi to km: how to perform it?
Now, that we understand the basics about these units and where they are used, let’s proceed with the miles to k transformations. They are not as difficult as one can think and require only one simple step.
Such calculation can be done manually based on the fact that 1 mile to km gives 1.60934. This multiplier should be used to perform the transformation. For instance, if you need to convert 5 miles, the equation will look as follows:
5 x 1.60934 = 8.04672
If we take 20 miles, the result will be 20 x 1.60934 = 32.1869. Thus, the bigger the initial value, the larger will be the difference between the numbers.
In addition, one may use different levels of precision depending on the goal of the calculation. For example, you can keep in mind the correlation 1:1.609 or 1:1.6, or you can round up any value that was obtained after the calculation and take approximately 8 km for 5 miles or 32 km for 20 miles.
