Edit: I just realized a bit of bias on my part. I probably wouldn’t have commented if you had used SI unit for mass [kg] even though that is just as often used in non-scientific context to mean “what the scale shows” as pounds.
I completley misread what you actually wrote and just took the “what weighs more, a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold” of the previous commenter into account.
You explicitly refer to mass, so sorry if you read the unedited comment.
We have an ambiguity between whether the weight-measure refers to mass or to what the scales show. For two objects (gold and feathers) it is stated that one of these properties is the same, and the question is about the other property. From the context, we can’t obviously disambiguate one way or the other. In such situations, assumptions are usually made to make the problem statement meaningful.
Feathers have lower density, so the same mass occupies greater volume, experiences greater buoyancy and weighs less.
Edit: I just realized a bit of bias on my part. I probably wouldn’t have commented if you had used SI unit for mass [kg] even though that is just as often used in non-scientific context to mean “what the scale shows” as pounds.
I completley misread what you actually wrote and just took the “what weighs more, a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold” of the previous commenter into account.
You explicitly refer to mass, so sorry if you read the unedited comment.
We have an ambiguity between whether the weight-measure refers to mass or to what the scales show. For two objects (gold and feathers) it is stated that one of these properties is the same, and the question is about the other property. From the context, we can’t obviously disambiguate one way or the other. In such situations, assumptions are usually made to make the problem statement meaningful.