How much things weigh — from paperclips to cars
Small car (4-door)
~1,400 kg
Think: 1.4 tonnes. A large SUV reaches 2,500 kg.
Adult human
~70 kg
A car weighs about 18–20 average people.
1 litre of water
exactly 1 kg
The anchor for all weight intuition.
A4 sheet of paper
~5 g
200 sheets = 1 kg. A ream (500 sheets) = 2.5 kg.
A logarithmic scale from 1 g to 100,000 kg — each column step is 10× heavier than the one before. Every item gets its own row so nothing overlaps.
Each step rightward is ×10. Items are sorted lightest → heaviest top to bottom.
Enter any weight to convert between the four most common units. Use the slider to step through the anchor values from Part B.
5 rounds. Pick the heavier object. Build your weight intuition — no looking things up!
Once you're fluent in everyday weights, it's worth knowing the extremes — both to calibrate your intuition and because these numbers come up in science, news, and conversation.
Grain of sand
~0.00003 g
30 micrograms. About 33,000 grains per gram.
Human red blood cell
~27 picograms
You have ~25 trillion of them — totalling ~2 kg of cells.
Full wine barrel
~300 kg
A 225 L Bordeaux barrique: ~170 kg wine + ~45 kg oak + sediment.
Adult hippopotamus
~2,000 kg
The third-heaviest land animal. Despite bulk, they can run at ~30 km/h.
African elephant (bull)
~5,500 kg
The heaviest land animal alive. About 4 cars, or 75 adult humans.
Humpback whale
~30,000 kg
About 20 cars. Much lighter than a blue whale, but still 400 adult humans.
Space Shuttle orbiter (empty)
~68,000 kg
The orbiter alone. At launch with external tank and boosters: ~2,000,000 kg.
Blue whale
~150,000 kg
~100 cars. The heaviest animal known to have ever existed.
Boeing 747 (max takeoff)
~412,000 kg
Empty weight ~178,000 kg. The rest is fuel, cargo, and passengers.
Saturn V rocket (fuelled)
~2,950,000 kg
~96% of that weight is propellant. Payload to the Moon: ~48,000 kg.
Eiffel Tower
~10,100,000 kg
~7,300 t of iron structure + ~2,800 t of other materials. Repainted every 7 years.
Great Pyramid of Giza
~6,000,000,000 kg
~6 billion kg — about 2.3 million stone blocks averaging ~2,500 kg each.
Typical cumulus cloud
~500,000,000 kg
Half a billion kg of water droplets — yet so diffuse they float.
All humans on Earth
~6 × 10¹¹ kg
~8 billion people × ~70 kg = 560 billion kg. A rounding error vs. the oceans.
Mount Everest
~8 × 10¹⁴ kg
800 trillion kg. Dwarfed by Earth's oceans (~1.4 × 10²¹ kg).
⚖️ Mass vs. Weight — what's the difference?
In everyday speech, "weight" and "mass" are used interchangeably — and that's fine. But technically: mass is the amount of matter in an object (measured in kg), while weight is the force gravity exerts on that mass (measured in newtons). Your mass is the same on the Moon as on Earth; your weight is about 6× less on the Moon because gravity is weaker there. When you stand on a bathroom scale, it's technically measuring force and displaying it as kg — a convenient convention. In this module and in daily life, "weight" and "mass" mean the same thing.
Values shown as equivalent weight on a bathroom scale (mass × planet gravity). Your mass never changes — only the gravitational pull does.
1. A bag of flour at the supermarket is typically how heavy?
2. How much does a full 5-person family (2 adults + 3 children) weigh together, roughly?
3. Someone says "this package weighs about 2 pounds." What is that in kg?
4. A gold bar (the kind held in bank vaults) — how heavy is it?
5. You're mailing a letter. The envelope + single page inside weighs roughly how much?
6. Which is heavier: a litre of olive oil, or a litre of water?