(no subject)

[vyvyanx]

Amusing imperial vs. metric quiz:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6989244.stm

I got 5 in the metric one but 2 in the imperial. Yet I still automatically think of certain things in everyday life in imperial units - human weight and height, vehicles' speeds and distances travelled.

Comments

[emperor]

Me too; I think the imperial questions were tricky, whereas the metric ones were mostly just mental arithmetic.

[simont]

I can imagine someone else having felt, however, that the imperial ones were "just" general knowledge, whereas the metric ones involved actually working things out...

(4/5 imperial, 5/5 metric.)

vyvyan: of course, there's no contradiction between you finding inches and feet to be convenient units of length and you not knowing all the dark corners of gills, hectares, furlongs, chains, dynes, grains and flibblywibblies...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I wasn't sure. Do people *really* use gils any more? Then again, I knew about gils, furlongs, and leagues, but not hands or fluid ounces.

[i-am-marky.livejournal.com]

I got 4/5 in both. Couple of Imperial ones were lucky guesses though.

[sparrowsion]

I got 4/5 imperial and 5/5 metric. Can't decide whether the metric ones really are that much easier, or it's just what we as younger folk/scientists are used to.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

5 right on both - though the "metric" questions involved more maths. The Imperial ones were a doddle.

[gerald_duck]

5/5 on both, though the pounds-in-a-ton one was a lucky guess and inches in a hand an intelligent one.

I agree that the imperial questions were deliberately trickier: in the 10,000m² question on the metric quiz, only one answer was a unit of area and a bushel isn't even metric!

I use imperial units for everything you do, but also for fuel economy (mpg), tyre pressure (psi), property area (acre), room dimensions (feet) and penis length/girth (inches), rack-mount equipment (U), depth (fathoms) and water/air speed (knots) as well as a few strange ones that seem to be neither imperial nor S.I. such as astronomical units, calories, angle degrees and "1:7"-style gradients for hills.

Although I tend not to buy milk or beer I'm entirely happy that they continue to be sold by the pint. I'm also sympathetic with whisky lovers faced with having to stop drinking dram measures.

I'd prefer using gallons to litres for fuel and wish I could still buy cheese by the pound. Both these are now, sadly, impractical. Conversely, I tend to translate things to S.I. for any tricky scientific or mathematical purposes.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

2/5 on imperial and 5/5 on metric. It's harder to set questions with strange and obscure units in metric, but they tried their best with "hectare". They only had the courage to go as far as micro and kilo, too. My comfort zone runs from pico to tera (peta? exa?), but that's having a science background for you.