And most pre-packaged foods are marked in metric units and not imperial.
Because when all of us older yanks were in elementary school, they tried to teach us the metric system.
They said that all EU countries used the metric system. Apparently we were lied to.
Back when you older Yanks were in elementary school, the EU didn’t exist yet- and I very much doubt you learned about the European Economic Community in elementary school.
[quote=“dmatsch, post:42, topic:548195”]
Well, I doubt your teachers were deliberately lying; seems an odd mistake for swathes of teachers across a 350-million strong population to make, though!
Maybe it was more along the lines of “a number of European countries use metric” and the message got mixed in translation somehow?
If you what you guys were told was “In Europe they use the metric system” then that’s a close enough approximation to the truth.
Most countries in europe exclusively use the metric system.
In the case of the UK, we still have a combination of systems, though over time I think more things are becoming metric. The other laggard countries are mainly in eastern europe, but they’ll adopt the metric system very rapidly to try to join the EU.
I would excuse your teachers for not adding these exceptions.
In some, if not most European countries you still the price of fruits and vegetables quoted in pounds (Pfunde, livres) but a pound is 500g. A friend of mine in Norway wanted to buy a piece of lumber 5 x 10 cm and heard the retail clerk order a 2 by 4 from the back room. I was with a friend in London just a few years after switch. She wanted to buy a couple yards of cloth and was informed by a quite snippy and unpleasant clerk that England was metric now. When Canada went metric (I think it was 1974) it went cold turkey. The only exception I can think of is sports. There may be only three downs in Canadian football, but first and ten means you got to go ten yards in those three downs. And the field not 100 meters long, but 110 yards. Baseball diamonds still have 90 feet between bases and the pitcher’s rubber is still 60’6" from home. But all road distances are in km only.
I would just like to add that mpg for gas mileage is a poor measure. Most metric countries use litres/100 km. I would not object to gal/100 miles. In order to clarify this point, answer quickly, which is the more significant improvement in fuel economy, going from 20 to 25 mpg or going from 30 to 40 mpg?
The first because you are going from 5 gal/100 miles to 4, saving one gal per 100 miles. For the second you are going from 3 1/3 gal/100 miles to 2 1/2, saving only 5/6 gal.
I don’t think that argument stands up. You’re saving less in the second case because you were already driving a more economical car. To illustrate with an extreme example, how about going from 100mpg to 10,000mpg? A pretty dramatic increase in fuel economy, I think you’ll agree. But it only saves 0.99 gal (1 gal per 100 miles before, 0.01 gal after), so according to that argument it’s a less significant improvement.
I think you need to measure the proportionate increase in mpg (or decrease in gals per mile) rather than the absolute. On that count, going from 30mpg to 40mpg is better than going from 20mpg to 25mpg.
[quote=“dmatsch, post:42, topic:548195”]
Forgive me if I read some kind of paranoia into the above statement, but this seems a common sentiment in these sorts of discussions (it’s already appeared in this thread before, for example). Taken all together, these seem to suggest a body of opinion that attempts to promote the metric system in America had some kind of hidden agenda - some motive other than it simply being a good idea.
You’ve quoted me saying something I didn’t say. Please don’t do that. That was someone else.
I’m sorry - it was an accident - After being deprived of nested quoting for so long on this board, I’m struggling to get used to it again.
Cool; no worries. 