Do You Speak In Metric ?

[Bazile]

If you say to me i live 15 kilometers up the road - i wouldn't have an idea of how far that is

If you said to me i live 15 miles up the road , i would straight away have , have a good sense of how far that is


etc etc

[fiction-factory]

I would say 95% of people, including youngsters, would use miles rather than km
Most people, including youngsters, would give their height and weight in feet & inches and stones & pounds.
I do speak m and cm for measuring walls, doors, tiles etc.

[wolf63]

The cold meat/deli counter in my local Tesco store is about as metric as I get. It all depends upon how alert I am - sometimes order in metric, sometimes using the old and sensible method and sometimes I just tell the girl how much I want in ££.

[chelle7272]

I use mixture, mostly non-metric though. Not a clue with metric distances but ok with (some) metric weights.
Height /width etc I use either depending on source info, but I refer to people's height in feet and inches.

[aelmpvw]

i'd rather have a pint of ale than 0.568261 litres

[sandyRoe]

I think of a km as 5 furlongs. But it's still miles, and pints, for me.

[237SJ]

I use a mixture of both. Short distances in metres, long distances in miles, cooking ingredients in grammes. In Australia, if you ask someone how far a place is they will tell you in the amount of time it takes to get there and don`t even mention the distance at all.

[Captain2]

When studying to be a Quantity Surveyor the UK was in Imperial measurements. By the time I got into the big bad world the profession had gone Metric so I had to learn that. End result is I'm pretty conversant with both systems; but best bit is when you go into, say, a timber merchants you order a 2 metre length of 4" x 2"

[Hopkirk]

I picture small measurements in relation to 6 inch or 12 inch rulers, from my school days.

Give me it in centimetres, and I'm lost.

[Cloverjo]

Height of people in feet and inches, weight in stones and pounds, distance in miles. But, short distances in metres and temperature in Celcius.

[Ken4155]

And i would walk 804.672 kilometres
And i would walk 804.672 kilometres more
Just to be the man who walked 1609.344 kilometres
Just to fall down at your door

Doesn't quite have the same foot-tapping rhythm to it, does it?:-)

[Old_Geezer]

Metric is for the laboratory and the continent. I'm happier with day to day stuff in imperial; and the weather forecasters should switch back to Fahrenheit which one can understand.

[Captain2]

It has to be Fahrenheit when we are complaining about being too hot but it has to be Centigrade (not this modernistic Celsius) when we are complaining about how cold it is.

[Old_Geezer]

Maybe for you, but I deliberately stay in °F in order to remain consistent, rather than dumb it down to 0° to aid others understanding.

[whiskeryron]

Yet another bl***y good reason for BREXIT lets get back to sensible weights & measures.

[jim360]

In what way are imperial weights "sensible"? They are arbitrary as hell (although so are all other units, really.) At least metric numbers are easier to work with numerically when converting from one scale to another.

[bhg481]

Smaller Imperial measures are based on body parts etc, so you can measure roughly without the aid of a ruler. Larger ones are based on the amount of land that could be ploughed etc. Metric measurements, whilst being simpler to use, are based on a cock-up - a metre was intended to be 1/000000th of the distance from the North Pole to the equator via Paris but they got it wrong. Since the kilogramme and litre are based on this the whole metric system has no accurate foundation.

[Gill1941]

What annoys me is when the BBC in particular always use kilometres not miles. I have no idea ( and do not wish to know) how much a kilometre is. We do not use them on signposts (thank goodness) so why do the BBC insist on using them?!

[jim360]

No accurate foundation like the length of a foot varies from person to person, you mean?

[bhg481]

What annoys me even more is the fact that no-one ever uses hectares - the have a special unit for area and people always use "square kilometers". The most likely reason is that no-one really has a clue what a hectare looks like.

[bhg481]

Imperial based on Henry VIII, I think, Jim. It's still good enough for people to get a ROUGH measurement.