How much does 20-pound bond paper weigh? - podcast episode cover

How much does 20-pound bond paper weigh?

Jul 18, 20122 min
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Episode description

Your average ream of printer paper is called 20-pound bond paper, but it doesn't actually weigh 20 pounds. Tune in as Marshall explains this strange American paper naming system -- and its metric alternative -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com, where smart happens Him Marshall Brain with today's question, how much does twenty pound bond paper way? When you go to the store and buy a printer paper, it's normally described as twenty pound bond paper, But what does that actually mean? The way we talk about paper in the United States

is amazingly convoluted. The short answer is that five hundred sheets of bond paper with the size of seventeen inches by twenty two inches have a weight of twenty pounds. The manufacturer would cut a sheet that big into four letter sized sheets, so a five hundred sheet ream of twenty pound bond paper actually weighs five pounds. Each sheet of paper therefore weighs one one of a pound, or about four and a half grams. If it was something other than bond paper, then the size of the standard

sheet used to determine the weight might be different. For example, bristol paper is heavier and stiffer, kind of like the paper and a Manila file folder. It's standard sheet size is twenty two and a half inches by twenty eight and a half inches. In general, the more a sheet of a certain grade of paper ways the thicker it is. You can purchase twenty pound or twenty four pound bond paper at the office supply store. The twenty four pound bond paper is thicker, heavier, and more opaque than twenty

pound bond. The metrics system has a much better way of measuring paper. A zero paper is a square meter of paper. One side is eighty four point one centimeters long, and the other is a hundred eighteen point nine centimeters. The longer sides length is the square root of two longer than the short sides length. A one paper is half of an A zero sheet, preserving the square root

of two rule. A two paper is half of an a one sheet, and so on, and paperweight is measured in grams per square meters, so it's very easy to figure things out. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com

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