I think football fields are only applicable for measurements of length (honestly, who knows just how wide a football field is? Science may never find an answer.) I think for area, we should use Fenways.
But yeah, that article bugs me. The way they worded that, it actually makes it more confusing because it gives the vague impression that “Kilometer” is just a funny word for “Mile” (it’s not; a kilometer is only slightly more than half of a mile). It was meaningless fluff that gives the impression that someone is being paid by the word.
Also, I’m from the US, and I moved from school to school a lot as a kid. This sampler pack of the US education system has given me the perhaps baseless interpretation that most American kids have to learn the metric system anyways, and that that’s been the case since around 1990 when I first paid any attention in school.
Way back at the start of this mystery, a local (Oz) newspaper reported that someone said they had seen the aircraft flying at “around 9144 metres”. That’s some incredible eyesight that person possesses. Or perhaps he said 30,000 feet. Hmm, I wonder which one is more likely.
(The same newspaper once had a recipe which said to cut meat into 2.54 cm cubes. That’s accurate to within a tenth of a millimetre! On the other hand “one inch cubes” isn’t.)
When I was a boy, my teacher would take me out in the yard and chain me to a rod by my hands and feet if I couldn’t fathom the English measures. I wasn’t there furlong.
What I don’t get is when stories that are specifically localized to the US (like in movies or video games) still use the metric with parenthetical conversions. The Phoenix Wright games will have the witness say something about meters and then have the protagonist say “And a meter is about yard, so…” It’s just silly.
Yeah, putting the conversions in parenthetically when there’s a specific measurement is good practice, IMO, particularly for a large internet site that no doubt gets readers from all over the world. I noticed that there was also a spot where the main measurement was in feet and they converted to meters.
But the very first parenthetical is totally moronic. “Chinese IL-76 aircraft combing the search zone observed two large objects and several smaller ones spread across several square kilometers (miles), Xinhua News Agency reported.”
