ABO NOCE Practice Test

The correct method to convert millimeters to centimeters is to divide the number of millimeters by 10. This is because there are 10 millimeters in a centimeter. Thus, to find out how many centimeters correspond to a given number of millimeters, you take the total number of millimeters and perform the division by 10.

For example, if you have 50 millimeters, dividing by 10 gives you 5 centimeters, confirming the conversion ratio. In contrast, multiplying by 100 would erroneously suggest that you are converting centimeters to another larger unit, and adding 10 would not effectively correlate to the metric system's conversions. Multiplying by 10, similarly, would yield an incorrect result when trying to express a smaller unit (millimeters) in terms of a larger unit (centimeters).