Dave Smith > wrote:

> I beg to differ with you nieces. The metric system is not harder than the
> Imperial system, which makes little sense to most people who swear by it. I
> am always prepared for people who claim it is better than metric, just ask
> them how many pints are in a gallon, how many gils in a pint, how many
> yards in a furlong, how many square rods in an acre. Metric is much easy
> to deal with.

Of those questions, only the first is even reasonable. Nobody uses gils
in everyday measurement, and except for horse races nobody uses furlongs.
Any decent surveyor will know the rods and acre conversion, because they
would have a use for it.

I was once asked by an Italian friend how many feet in a mile, which I
knew because I learned it in school, but for everyday usage who really
cares? You don't normally need to know because the scale is so different
it doesn't make sense to convert feet to miles. It may be easy to convert
picolitres to litres, but is it really a common need?

> > It's funny that in spite of the public's stubborn resistance, a vast number of
> > things are in metric and have been for quite a long time. Global trade does that
> > kind of thing.

> We have been metric in Canada for thirty years now and it works. Soft
> drinks come in the same size cans as in the US, but the contents are listed
> as 355 ml instead of 12 oz. The only problem with metric for most people is
> that that they spend too much time trying to convert it to Imperial instead
> of just learning to think metric. It is like learning a second language.

I totally agree with you here. I lived in France for a while and I came to
understand that 500 grams was, for practical everyday use, about a pound.
There is no need to know it's really 1.1 pound when you are buying flour,
luncheon meat or butter. Converting precisely from one to the other is
pointless. Note that even in the US soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi are
sold by the litre except for the small sizes. 1, 1.5, 2 and 3 litre are
all commonly sold in the supermarkets. Does anyone really spend time
figuring out the exact conversion? I hope not. But, that kind of thinking
does lead to confusion.

Bill Ranck
Blacksburg, Va.