A kilo of strawberries – or would you prefer a pound?

Chris – sorry but I have to disagree with yoru first point: “no one under 65 was taught anything other than metric…..”

Under Thatcher’s education reforms of the late 1980’s the National Curriculum was brought in.

Under the National Curriculum it is a legal requirement that all school pupils are taught imperial and metric and their conversions in Key Stage 3 and 4 mathematics.

This is stil the case.

I am a teacher of mathematics with 17 years of experience. Frankly I would be pleased NOT to have to teach this as the students find it hard and boring, but by law it has to be taught and exam boards examine it as part of the GCSE.

Additionally when I was at school between 1974 and 1986 I was taught imperial and metric,but in those days it appeared to be down to each school to choose which they used. I will say one good thing for the National Curriculum and it’s mandatory content on this topic: at least since 1988 all students have learned BOTH and no one has been left knowing only one or the other and being unable to recognise the one they were not taught.

Your second point about timer merchants made me raise an eyebrow but I am not in a position to make any remark other than that the national timber merchant based in the city where I live sells things in feet and inches, and their metric equivalents (e.g. a 6 foot length of timer is labelled as 182 cm, which is the direct equivalent to 6 feet) , but I don’t really know much about the timber trade and I have no idea how “out of step” they may or may not be. I do, however, know that plumbers merchants sell drainpipes, copper tube and guttering in mm but that if you look at the sizes on sale they are exact metric equivalents of 4 foot, 6 foot and 8 foot lengths.

This is clearly a complex area – much more complex than I or most other posters on here seem to have realised before Asda hit the headlines.

Michduncg.
No, I’m not saying that ALL maths is taught in BOTH systems, what I am saying is that within the National Curriculum for maths ONE of the compulsory topics that has to be taught is the system of metric measures (predominately linear measure, mass and volume and the parallel system of Imperial measures.
I’m not sure of the original reasoning for this when the NC was drawn up but at the present time the reasoning is that the majority of people (according to the ONS) would be utterly lost of asked to track their weight or height in metric and because “Commonly used units such as Lbs, PInts, Feet and Inches are part of everyday life” (I’m quoting the LEA maths advisor for the area in which I work and she i turn is paraphrasing the NC documentation).

By odd co-incidence I was sitting on the bus home tonight and overheard a conversation between a young man of about 19 and his friend who were discussing the baggage weight limits for travel as they planned a snowboarding trip. One of them asked the other what he was taking and the other listed the items. THe first then said “will that be less than the 30kilos limit?” and the second replied “Year, 30 kilos is way massive its like 60 bags of sugar” – which is a fair approximation as sugar still comes in 454g bags – 1Lb or almost half a kilo). THe first replied “Are you sure, I thought 30 kilos was only about 15 bags of sugar” – which would mean they would be 2 kilo or 4 Lb (approx) bags – not a size I see most people buying in the shops. They debated this for a while before solving the matter by looking up Tesco shopping on their mobile phones and soon discovering that 30 kilos really is like 60 bags of sugar because Tesco on line (presumably) shows 1Lb bags of sugar with the metric equivalence shown.
To me this seems to illustrate the need for us to understand both systems, whichever we believe is most widely used.
Just to add to the mayhem, of course, we need to remember that we are not the only country that uses imperial: the good old US of A retains imperial, but just to make life really fun US imperial is not the same as UK imperial. I can’t seethe US changing any time soon just because quite a few other countries are Metric?!

Another though comes to mind: when did you last see any clothes on sale in metric sizes? If you ask a bloke what size waist and chest he is he’ll probably tell you something like 32″ waist and 46″ chest. If you ask him for metric he’ll as like as not not have the slightest clue. I believe that ladies dress sizes are also based on inches.

I also note that gas is still measured in cubic feet by gas meters (1 cubic foot being 1 unit) and then the gas companies and the customers have to perform elaborate calculations to change this to cubic meters and then to KwH just to lease the bureaucrats. At each stage the calculation the re is a value which usually has many decimal places and it is always rounded UP, which means the gas company gets to charge for more than we’ve actually used and we lose out. If we’d kept imperial for billing for gas we would all save a little money each year.
Finally your comment on engineering using metric – I have no experience in this field at all other than to note that, rather like timber and plumbing to which I referred yesterday, most engineering materials seem to be sold in curious metric quantities which, when you look at the conversion, just happen to be the exact equivalents of imperial measures such as Lbs, feet, inches or cubic feet. I’ll hazard a guess that this, like jam jars, is because it would cost too much to replace all the massive machinery with metric versions? I don’t know – just guessing.

To me the bottom line is, as is the case in so many other aspects of life, we actually need to keep several systems in place at once and use each where they work best, rather than trying to force a “one size fits all” solution onto systems where actually that size doesn’t fit at all

Ref the comment ‘The assertion that imperial is defined by metric is flabbergastingly incorrect’ – sorry, but in 1959, the US and the UK Governments officially redefined imperial measurements based on the metric system. So from that date, Imperial has officially been a subset of metric.

[We have edited in the correct quotation of Dave D’s words. Thanks, mods.]

Recently I pointed out some spelling and typing errors in a post on another conversation (Royal Mail) and was promptly shouted at by Patrick Steen of Which? for being offensive.

michduncg has above mis-quoted Dave D in a way which is highly disrespectful and utterly changes the meaning of what he is quoting. I don’t understand why Patrick hasn’t shouted yet?

It was a genuine mistake that I inserted the word ‘stupid’ in place of ‘incorrect’ and if this system allowed me to delete or amend the comment I would.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that I was right in my assertion that Imperial measurements were redefined by the UK & US Governments in 1959, so that they are based on metric measurements.

As a 3rd grader in NY State in 1975 we learned metric along with US Customary, and as an Engineer with a Masters degree I can tell you all engineering courses & textbooks in the US are taught in metric. However in the real world including most of industry (and by the way I worked for Nissan mfg in Tennessee for some time) most measurements and calculations are conducted in US Customary despite the cars being made from parts made using metric measurements. Most of the equipment we built in-house was made using US materials sold in US measurements through US vendors and everything Nissan installed was remeasured into US Customary anyway so it could be modified. If externally-sourced tools, fasteners, toolholders, equipment parts, etc are in metric then they are simply ordered in metric and that measurement is retained. Our biggest problem was the Japanese using Japanese anthropometric data when the plant was built so light switches were placed near waist level, desks were 22″ high instead of the “normal” 28-30″, and overhead conveyors were being bumped into constantly (< 80"). Most auto part attributes which require plant workers to judge weight, length, distance, or insertion force are converted into US Customary for clarity, except discrete parts like bolts & nuts which only have to be selected and placed. I, like many engineers, have most of the conversions memorized anyway so this is not a big deal. Or we just take out the tape measure or scale and remeasure it for ourselves.
Any engineer who designs in this country uses both systems; having a preference to one system or the other is secondary since despite your ego and "principles" you have to deal with what you are handed. I personally prefer inches and feet since they easier to design with. For most manufacturing environments, outside of NASA or precision instruments, building something down to the millimeter is impractical for most tools outside of a machine shop, the closest 1/8" (0.125") or 1/4" (0.250") is close enough for manufacturing purposes.
BTW, the only things metric in Canada are their road signs & temps. I visited Toronto for business and not one thing in the auto parts mfg plant was in metric, including weights. Even in the IKEA store there, furniture dimensions were advertised in metric on the signage but most people were using the paper inch scales to measure the furniture. And for the record, I found the metric road signs confusing despite my ability to convert in my head. When you have exactly 3 seconds or less to see, read, comprehend, and act upon a road sign, trying to convert that while driving at high speeds distracts the driver long enough to create a hazardous traffic condition, in my opinion.

Just to reinforce michduncg’s comments on the 1959 agreement, it was actually a six-party agreement. The other parties were the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. All were using slightly different relationships between the foot and meter(metre) and between the pound and kilogram.

All agreed 1 ft = 0.3048 m and 1 lb = 0.453 592 37 kg and to rely on these declarations and their metric physical standards, rather than Imperial/Customary physical standards. Prior to this the US and UK foot differed by around 3.7 ppm, and we compromised on a value proposed by Canada. The new values are commonly referred to as the International foot and pound, but they are only a six-party agreement. For the US, they were adopted 1959-07-01 by publication in the Federal Register by the Department of Commerce, a rule-making Federal agency. I believe the formal adoption in the UK was a little later, but I am unsure of the details.

The US first used this approach in 1893 (Mendenhall order) but with a slightly different value for the foot, 1200/3937 m. This value has been retained for some land survey work and is known as the Survey foot; it may not be used for other purposes.

This is not a slight to you, but to your teachers. You were not taught very well. Students must be taught to use units of measure (actually measure things), not just do mathematical manipulation.

You are about 178 cm (I’m 194 cm, and born well before you, 1944). One tip: although most people are comfortable using centimeters, perhaps it would be easier to avoid the prefixes centi-, deci-, deka-, and hecto-. By using only prefixes which are multiples or submultiples of 1000, a prefix error is so large as to usually be quite obvious. Is 1.78 m any easier to visualize?

We have the same problem in the US. Students are NOT taught to actually use metric. They are taught to answer stupid questions like “how many nanometers in a kilometer.” While the answer is 10^12, the question does not often come up in the real world, so it is not a very useful skill.

You still have miles, miles per gallon, and pints of beer (though be sure to ask for a top up if you are served 500ml).

I cannot imagine many would want to go back to pounds, shillings and pence. If you are old enough to be familiar with the old system, what is wrong with being bilingual as far as measurements go? Give him an inch and he will take 25.4mm.

In Spain we still use pre-metric expressions which have survived metrication so the French person´s comments about the English losing their traditions have no foundation. Why should 98% of the world have to adapt to 2 countries whose units do differ? It is simply embarrassing, frustrating and incomprehensible that Britain uses ºC, litres, metres for cloth, wood, doors etc… kilos for weight and tonnes for heavier things such as vehicles yet yards and miles for distance. How long can this mish-mash continue. Some government will eventually see the light and consign the outdated imperial units which nobody since the 1960s has been educated in, to the dustbin.