Question: Why is it that when you are measuring your mass, it is called getting weighed?

James Holloway answered on 11 Mar 2013:

Aha! Good question.

The thing is in day to day life, the mass of a brick and its weight are thought of as the same thing. But mass and weight are different.

Mass is how much stuff there is in an object. Weight is how much force that stuff feels because of gravity.

So if we took our brick and weighed it while on earth, it would weigh a certain amount. If we them went to the moon with our brick and weighed it there it would weigh a lot less. This is because there is less gravity on the moon, somethings weigh less there.

However, the brick will always have the same mass!

So when we jump on the scales, we are being ‘weighed’ because we are measuring how hard our mass is pushing down due to gravity (which is our weight!).