Second sound travels about 343 meters in one second in air; light takes 1.3 seconds to reach Earth from the surface of the Moon, a distance of 384,400 kilometers. A second is part of other units, such as frequency measured in hertz (inverse seconds or second), speed (meters per second) and acceleration (meters per second squared). The metric system unit becquerel, a measure of radioactive decay, is measured in inverse seconds. The meter is defined in terms of the speed of light and the second; definitions of the metric base units ampere and candela also depend on the second. Of the
Enzyme unit SI unit, the enzyme unit is discouraged in favour of the katal, the unit recommended by the General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1978 and officially adopted in 1999. One katal is the amount of enzyme that converts 1 mole of substrate per second, so The enzyme unit should not be confused with the international unit (IU); although it is true that both measure chemical activity and that for many enzymes 1 U = 1 IU (because for many enzymes the existing U was adopted as the newer IU), international units can be defined for the biologic activity of