Metric is simple. You simply multply by factors of 10 to get the next one up. 10 mm make one cm, 100 cm make one metre, and 1000 metres make one km, and so on. A simpleton could understand it.
Imperial is much more complex, being much older. 12 inches make a foot, 3 feet make a yard, 1,760 yards make a mile, and so on. You need to be good at mental arithmetic to use it.
Perhaps it’s not surprising mathematical standards are falling, with kids no longer having to exercise their brains so much.
In UK schools, in general, only Metric is taught. In our school, however, they took a more practical approach, and deliberately taught us both, so we could easily judge and navigate a distance that was quoted to us in either, because in the real world Imperial is still used all the time. The same applies to weights and other measures.
Should we pick just one system and suppress the other, or continue using both for different purposes, a situation that is hugely more complicated than either on its own?
Yes, both, of course. But I don’t think the culprit for declining grades on such a mass scale is the metric system. You could argue that being simpler, it allows for greater efficiency in doing homework. Grades should be going up!
I don’t know. I America, a few billion dollars it’s really that much money.
We also, as members of the general public, know almost nothing about NASA except that in the 80s they made an awesome movie called, “space camp”, and that they’re all over Florida and Huntsville, Alabama.
I think they’re involved in some stuff with that Lockheed-Martin company too. The ones who make the missiles. They got a missile plant about 150 miles south of here.
Four farthings to a penny, 12 pennies to a Shilling, 20 Shillings to a Pound, and 21 shillings to a guinea, not forgetting 60 groats to a Pound, what could be easier?
I never did get on with 100 pennies to the pound; 100 is such a big number and its a lot of hands and fingers to remember.
If you want to sell stuff to the USA and a couple other countries, then you need to know imperial units … otherwise you don’t.
[attachment=0]map_of_countries_that_dont_.png[/attachment]
Haha, is that just Liberia, Myanmar and the US? Lol.
S.I. units are metric, which is a pretty big deal. Most of the world has a total hard-on for the decimal system, even though 10 only has 2 factors. 12 has 4 including non-primes, which is a third of the digits in base 12, compared to a fifth like with the decimal system. Lack of factors means more messy notations.
16 is a good one too, but for powers and roots rather than factors. Its compatibility with binary is just funky. Using base 12 (0-B) or base 16 (0-F) is no more or less intuitive than decimal - it’s just that base 10 (0-9) is forced down our throats from such an early age, it becomes second nature.
But whilst I think metric is over-rated, imperial is so inconsistent and slapdash. It’s basically the product of what seemed like a good idea at various times, all chucked together. At least metric is standardised. I’m all in favour of simplicity - I sincerely doubt it makes people bad at maths if they learn a simple system. Whilst I think metric is a step up from imperial, I think we should go further and switch to hexadecimal.
9+7 = 10, 2^8 = 100, 100/2 = 80… it’s not so bad if u get into it.
Keep cutting things in half using metric, and see how soon you need a calculator. The two systems use two different parts of the brain. Imperial is all about relations, ratios, proportions. Metric is about abstract systems. Each has its strengths and weaknesses - or, rather, each echoes the strengths or weaknesses of the people using them.
Phyllo, the map makes it look like only a small part of the world uses those measurements and therefore I should conclude that those measurements are insignificant. BUT, the red parts of the map are where most of the world’s money sits.
Whether an American is virtuous or not is not the point. My point is that regardless of how Americans choose to exercise their freedom, and regardless of how the rest of the world feels about that, some Americans (some, not all–certainly not you smears ) are rather blind-sighted when they boast about their rights to do this or that on the basis of their god-given freedom. Fine, you have the freedom–do it, go ahead–but sometimes the things you do are stupid–stupid in the sense that your only going to hurt yourself (and maybe your country) in the long run.
That’s kind of a vacuous statement, don’t you think? Okay, you’ve chosen freedom–what exactly have you chosen to do?
I don’t think this is really true.
For the vast majority of people both systems are about measures, not “relations, proportions and ratios”, (all of which are applicable to both metric and imperial).
The only practical difference is the ease with which those measurements are used.
When I deal in wood, my rule has inches on one side and mm, cm on the other. I have a free choice between them.
I was brought up with feet and inches, but have found myself moving to metres nearly 100% of the time. Factions of an inch just don’t provide the ease of use, that mm do.
The same is true of volume measure and weight.
In all three cases of measurement, imperial the old traditional irrelevant, outdated and inconsistent measurements that were based on ridiculous and variable things such as the size of a thumb the length of an arm, or the size of a piss pot are less useful than SI units which are a fully integrated and interchangeable system, whose conversion requires nothing more the the movement of a decimal point.
) are rather blind-sighted when they boast about their rights to do this or that on the basis of their god-given freedom. Fine, you have the freedom–do it, go ahead–but sometimes the things you do are stupid–stupid in the sense that your only going to hurt yourself (and maybe your country) in the long run.