Metric or Imperial? Or both?

[Ming the Merciless]

What this therefore means is no one under the age of 50 in the UK should be using Imperial as a primary method of measurement, as they were taught in the metric system.

Basically, Imperial implies you are 'old'

Whilst the people in their 60's and above may have an excuse and it's just about possible for someone now coming up to retirement age to have missed out on being taught metric, anyone now in their 50's would have been taught in metric, and anyone in their late 40's and younger has no excuse!

Born around 1957 seems to be the break point.
Born before 1957 you 'may' have an excuse.
Born after 1957 you do not!

Not really as the world outside school was and still is in some areas imperial. So many in their 40's and 50's have far more experience of working in imperial rather than metric.

What schools teach doesn't always match with the world outside. We learn more by doing than listening in a class so regular practical experience and exposure can often trump something taught for a brief time.

 

[classic33]

I meant the school had their old textbooks and were still teaching from those.

School closed a few years ago. But the same books were being used well after I left.

 

[mistyoptic]

Mine's a pint

 

[the_mikey]

I'm mostly metric, having studied engineering it's very easy to appreciate the value of having the metric system against an arbitrary collection of seemingly unrelated and haphazard units.

 

[DaveReading]

Other than countries such as Russia and China, air navigation throughout most of the world is still based on nautical miles, knots and feet.

 

[palinurus]

I work in the electronics industry so at work it's a split of both. The printed circuit board people- in Europe- use ounces per sq. inch. to describe the thickness of copper for example, Americans like using imperial, in particular thou. instead of microns, only they call them mils (I know thou.-microns conversions so well I don't generally need to look them up)

Asia is mostly metric but sometimes this depends on where the company is headquartered.

 

[nickyboy]

I checked with 19yr old what he does. He is entirely metric except people's height and weight which are feet & inches and stones & pounds. As a student he measures beer in pints too

We were discussing the distances of planets from the sun in scaled down form (following the excellent Brian Cox "Planets" series) and our conversation was entirely in millimetres, metres and kilometres. He can't visualise inches, feet, miles and I can do both so we use metric.

I suspect we will become a metric-only society other than a few stubborn things as time goes by

 

[Proto]

The only thing I found I needed to know as a young engineer in the 1970s was that one millimetre = 40 thou (more or less).

And the most metricated of machinists, even though they might have metric measuring instruments, a machine tool with metric dials, will stall say things like, “take a couple of thou off”. The “thou” is the perfect engineering unit.

I’ve written hundreds of CNC machine programmes. Every single one of them metric but I still talk about thous’

 

[Chris S]

I looked this up, officially Imperial measurements were finally withdrawn from UK schools in July 1974.
From that point metric was compulsory teaching and imperial optional.

That would fit in with my experience at primary school
https://www.cyclechat.net/threads/metric-or-imperial-or-both.250615/post-5661024