It's a common misconception that America does not use the metric system. Every single laboratory and research facility and anything related to actual science of course uses it almost exclusively. When people take physics and chemistry courses in college they aren't teaching it in miles and pounds and ****.

The average joe on the street doesn't use it, which isn't ideal, but not really that big of a deal.

The engineers at my research facility, however, measure everything imperial. Sucks when you quickly try to find a fitting for an European instrument

I'm completely serious. 50% may be way too high. Your premise is apparently that children learn the system in school. I see no reason to believe that.

Yea which is good because there have been cases of American scientists ****ing up some big projects due to using imperial and not properly converting units

Even here in Canada people casually talking about weight always do it in pounds and if someone asks your height the answer is always in feet/inches. But the basis of imperial is pretty stupid an vastly inferior to the metric system in every way

What sucks is that even people like me, who have a background in science and who know and understand the metric system units quite well, still is forced to describe things in imperial units, just to be able to effectively communicate.

If someone asks me how much something weighs and I tell them something kilograms they're gonna look at me like I'm from outerspace.

That's one big reason why the metric system never catches on as the common language, even though a decent chunk of people here in the US know it and would use it.

In, dunno, 20 years of being on the internet, this is the first time I feel I've been successfully trolled, wp sir.

Grunching here, but who ****ing cares? It's not like one would ever divide a mile up into X-foot segments. Miles are divided into fractions of a mile.

In the unlikely event that one needed this information, one would look it up. As for how many of us just happen to remember this piece of trivia from when we heard it in elementary school, I'd be shocked if it's over 5%, and 1% might even be too high.

Why? Because it is useless trivial information. If people didn't know how many feet in a yard or inches in a foot, I would be more concerned, as those divisions are actually used.

The metric system is obviously better overall because we use a base 10 numbering system ldo, but base 12 would be far better.

Anyone old who ever ran track remembers the "440", which is a quarter mile race.

The list of things that >50% of a large group know is incredibly small even on super simple things like this

For some reason I always think it's 4290, which I believe I'm confusing with the number of hits Pete Rose had to reach to break Ty Cobb's record.

they should just change mile high stadium to 5,280 foot high stadium

if it's a problem

That is a tall ****ing stadium

I guess I"m a little biased having watched hundreds of people posing on the 5280 foot step at the Capital. That, plus the Denver magazine is called 5280, lol.

Right, but the answer is 1000, not 5280, so it's much easier to remember. Even if some people don't know the system behind it, most of them still know 1000m = 1km. Everybody with a driver's license knows due to signs / navigation showing distances in 1200m or 1.2km all the time. In school you'd have a 500m run and a 1000m run, and everybody knows it's 0.5 and 1km respectively.

For Europeans, this is a simple fact of life that requires no thought. It's also the measurement that's used most often compared to weight or volume, I'll give you that the number of Euros knowing how many grams are in a kilo will be lower.

I'm not saying 100 pct will know m in km but I'd bet the house on over 50.

One would hope so, as it's about 66,880 feet a minute. (At mean sea level on a standard day.)

I'm not sure more than 60% know their own name. No chance in hell that many know how many feet in a mile. My wife has multiple graduate degrees and doesn't know.

chop,

Expert job at poll choice ranges:

Was gonna say "over 60%" but then remembered that 50% of people are drooling morons and went with 40-50. Discussion makes it sound like even that is too high? Everyone itt knows this without looking it up right?

Was thinking between 10-20 before opening the thread; went with 10-15. Most Americans couldn't point out 5 countries on a world map; no way they're going to remember an arbitrary number they were (possibly) taught in 5th grade.

i am curious as to what people think the % is for the over 18, american OOT population. quite a bit under 50% IMO.

I think that people would adapt pretty quickly if the decision was just made to change to metric, just the same as how no one is bothered at all by stuff being sold in two-liter bottles. If the weather forecast is always given in Celsius, even the dumbest people are going to pick up the numbers pretty quickly, etc.

Measuring weather in Fahrenheit is one area where USA#1 actually gets it right. For that purpose, it totally makes more sense to use a scale where 0-100 represents something approximating the typical range of experienced temperatures, rather than a more compressed scale based on the boiling point of water, which has no relevance whatsoever in that context.

**** European fittings!

yep

Metric is clearly better for volume (although a shot being ~1oz is nice), mass, and distance.