What on Earth is a liquid ounce?
As someone from a country that was colonised by the British once upon a time, I learned how to use the metric system. And oh, boy, does it make sense. 100 centimetres to a metre. 1000 metres to a kilometre. 1000 millilitres to a litre. Liquid water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. The prefixes and base-10 multiples make everything so easy to understand.
The imperial system on the other hand…
With the imperial system, 40 degrees Fahrenheit is cold (which doesn’t sound right to me). The imperial ton is not the same as the metric tonne. And it doesn’t stop there.
Ok, so let’s say you want to get a drink at a restaurant. You can get a pint of…juice (#nonalcoholicdrinking). How much is a pint? Well, it’s 16 fluid ounces. What’s a fluid ounce? I don’t have an ounce of an idea (see what I did there)?
So 8 pints make a gallon. So does the imperial system work based on multiples of 4? Not exactly. For example, a yard is 3 feet. A mile is…1760 yards. Or 8 furlongs. Who came up with these names?
So the imperial system originated in Britain (makes sense, as they were imperial gold standard a couple of hundred years ago). Apparently, it combined many different forms of measurements from various cultures, such as the Romans and Anglo-Saxons, which probably explains why it’s so confusing.
Eventually, the UK adopted the European metric system in 1968 (they now use the metric along with the imperial ). Currently, the only countries that use the imperial system are the US ( with their own modified version), Liberia and Myanmar.
Now I will give the imperial system credit, it makes height sound better. It sounds much cooler to say I’m 6,1″ than to say I’m 1.85 metres tall. But that’s about all the good things the imperial system has going for it, in my opinion. I’ll stick to the metric system, thank you very much.
Sources:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-that-use-imperial