in answer to the question, 'How tall are you?', it's very rare to hear a young person answer in the metric way - usually, it's 5'-11" or 6'-2".....or whatever. It makes me wonder about our education system!
This doesn't surprise me Tom, and I don't think it's connected with the education system.
As convenient as the metric system is to work with, its great failing is not being related to human scale. Take 5'6" and 168 cm.
The comparison I draw is this. If I throw 168 identical items onto the ground and ask you how many, you'll have to count them. But if I throw 5 or 6 items down you won't have to, a glance and you'll instantly recognise five or six in your minds eye. For the same reasons it easy to sum up a small number of feet and inches
It's because it's in human scale, our imperial measures grew out of practical daily usages, not from an arbitrary section of the earth's circumferance.
Some years ago I conducted a small experiment with a
batch of people like myself who grew up with Imperial measure, and a group of youngish Australian adults who had only ever known metric.
The experiment was to guess the three dimensions of a wide variety of boxes of different sizes, only using sight. I had half expected the outcome, but the result shook even me. Those using imperial were by a huge margin far more accurate than those using metric.
I had the opportunity to repeat this years later on a much smaller scale with just two metric users and myself and another used to imperial. The results were clearly the same, the larger the number of units necessary to guess the size, the disproportionally greater the error.
The fact is we like the ease of single or at least smaller numbers, 8 gallons to fill up feels more friendly than 37 litres, 8 miles rather than 13 kilometres etc.
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