Europeans Laugh At Imperial: Americans, It’s Time To Prove Them Wrong In This Measurements Quiz

Even their next door neighbours - Canada - use metric. They are so backwards, it's unbelievable.

True but the heading should be "test your ability to use [both systems]" . There's nothing else in this test.

So do I. I can be biased, but to me metric is just logical (10 based) therefore immediate. Imperial is not, therefore bothersome

I grew up with the metric system and Celsius, but quickly had to adapt when we moved to the U.S. nearly 15 years ago. I still have to whip out my phone and enter numbers in a converter from time to time!

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I can still just about work in the old, now largely deprecated, UK Imperial, which was still the norm through my early years growing up there. The US use of feet, rather than yards, to measure distances like how far to the next road junction is always confusing, at least in the UK where they use yards it's not too fr off metres so quite simple. But the US volume measures for cooking are something I can never get used to. Spoon measures are OK, used in French recipes too, but the second they get on to cups I will throw that recipe away and find one where I don't need to convert to weight using different values for different ingredients.

The original mile is equal to 1000 steps of a marching Roman Legionaire (mille passuum). The current Imperial length of a mile is equal to eight furlongs which is a measure of how far an oxen can plow before needing a rest, 660 feet x 8. Seems perfectly logical to me.

The SI system takes much less learning to use than older weights and measures and it's a single coherent system, but isn't particularly logical when you look at how the units are defined. Where's the logic in one metre being the distance travelled by light in vacuum during a ⁠1/299792458 of a second? There was *logic* in defining 1 acre as 22 yards x 220 yards, due to the way fields were used and land surveying was done. Defining a statue mile as 1760 yards was *logical*, since it has many factors and so lends itself to convenient arithmetic; 1/4 mile being 440 yards etc. But that was then and this is now. One kilometre is 1000 metres and that's that. I give that example because even in my lifetime, three different miles were commonly used. The statute mile of 1760 yards, the nautical mile (1/60th ° of latitude at the Earth's equator, more recently 1,852 metres or about 6076ft) and the US survey mile - 3.2 mm longer than the statue mile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#US_survey

I grew up with both because of my dad's business. I'm European, and the only things that make no sense to me are cups, fluid ounces and spoons. So conversion of a recipe gives me headaches. But even in metric recipes "add a pinch of xxx and a dash of yyy" aggravates me. Therefore 18/20

Any non American would tank the test, because why would any of us bother with imperial?