# Definition:Scalar Quantity/Examples

## Examples of Scalar Quantities

### Mass

The mass of a body is a measure of how much matter it contains.

Mass is equivalent to inertia.

Mass also determines the degree to which a body creates or is affected by a gravitational field.

It is a scalar quantity.

### Volume

Volume is the measure of the extent of a body.

It has three dimensions and is specified in units of length cubed.

### Density

Density is a physical quantity.

The density of a body is its mass per unit volume.

### Speed

The speed of a body is a measure of the magnitude of its velocity, taking no account of its direction.

It is, therefore, a scalar quantity.

### Temperature

Temperature is a physical property of matter that quantifies how hot or cold a body is.

It is a scalar quantity which can be mapped directly to the real number line.

### Electric Potential

An electric potential is the amount of work needed to move a unit of electric charge from a given reference point to a specific point in an electric field without producing an acceleration.

The reference point is usually either Earth or a point at infinity, although any point can be used.

### Electric Charge

Electric charge is a physical quantity of matter which causes it to experience a force when near other electrically charged matter.

It is a scalar quantity.

It has been discovered by experiment that the corresponding force depends on the magnitudes of those electric charges, their displacements from each other, and their velocities.

### Entropy (Physics)

Entropy is a property of a thermodynamic system.

It quantifies the number $\Omega$ of microstates that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system.

The entropy of a system is equal to the expectation of the value:

$k \ln P$

where:

$k$ is a constant which relates the mean kinetic energy and absolute temperature of the system
$P$ is the coefficient of probability of the system.