Because most Australians over the age of 40 are bilingual. We use metric for most things, but we still commonly express height in feet and inches, rainfall or bolt sizes in inches and so forth.
The older people get, the more bilingual they get. People in their 50s and older who lived through the change over will commonly prefer one standard over the other, especially when estimating.
So it’s quite plausible that some old cop estimated the weight in pounds (or stone or hundredweight), and that was the figure given at the initial press briefing. That figure was then then converted to metric.
Of course it’s more plausible that they just added up the weights on the boxes.
Even those of us who are bilingual don’t estimate large weight in pounds; I think that’s pretty much a US thing. Anything that looks as though it might weigh more than, say, oh, about fourteen pounds is estimated in stones, hundredweights or tons. I might estimate somebody’s weight as ten stone, but never as 140 lbs. And I’d certainly never estimate anything to weigh 10,000 lbs. I have no idea what 10,000lbs looks like.
[Works out sum with burnt match on lino floor.] It looks like just under four and a half tons.
[Works out another sum.] Besides, 10,000 lbs is not 4.2 tonnes; it’s more that 4.5 tonnes.
And 4.2 metric tonnes is not the metrication of any rounded guess in imperial measures used in Australia. 4 tons = 4.06 tonnes.
The way I initially read bob++'s post was suggesting a journalist came up with the Imperial figure, which is pretty unlikely because the average age of journalists in Queensland is definitely under 40.
Yes. Although I quoted you, I really meant to respond to bob++'s sugestion that somebody had estimated the weight at 10,000 lbs. I don’t think any Australian of any vintage would do that. And the second part of my post is making the point that 4.2t is not, in any case, the metric conversion of 10,000 lbs, or of any likely round estimate in any imperial units.
I reckon you’re right. The ammunition is in boxes, the boxes are marked by weight, and 4.2t is the approximate sum of the marked weights.