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Why America Needs the Metric System
| Article
# : |
19936 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
1,561 Words |
| Author
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Valerie Antoine
Valerie Antoine is an engineer who is manager of support
services for Litton Guidance & Control Systems, Woodland
Hills, California. Her avocation is serving as executive
director of the U.S. Metric Association, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to helping make an easy, economical
U.S. conversion to the metric system |
Just as English has been established as the worldwide language of business, the metric system is the world's language of measurement because most of the countries on this rapidly shrinking globe use metric. Metric nations are not forced to accept U.S. industry's inch-pound products, as they have in the past, because those nations now have become industrialized and can produce their own metric products.
With the metric drumbeat heard around the world, it is amazing that the American public doesn't realize it already is partly in step with that drumbeat. For many years, Americans have been buying and using products manufactured in metric system dimensions: soft drinks by the liter, cars built to metric standards, wine and spirits by the liter and milliliter, film and camera equipment measured in millimeters, skis in centimeters, the contents of many grocery product packages given in metric units.
Yet ask the average consumer's views on switching from the inch-pound measurement system to metric system units and the response usually is: "Metric would be too confusing. I'd never learn to use it." It is obvious that, without realizing it, the U.S. public already knows some of the everyday metric units it will be required to use; therefore, learning to use the metric system, as it very gradually eases into the consumer's life-style, will be no problem. Additionally, the nation's nonprofit U.S. Metric Association, which is assisting government agencies and companies to make the metric changeover, provides guidelines that make remembering metric units easy.
Those opposing a switch to the metric system insist that the inch-pound system is better because it is based upon parts of the human body. As sizes of body parts differ, depending upon the size of the person, this argument doesn't make much sense. In international education competitions, our young people get low scores partly because they are competing with foreign youngsters who have the advantage of using the metric system. Because the metric system is a decimal system, it does not require common fractions in calculations, making metric much easier to use. Consider the difference in time and accuracy when adding13/16, 1/4, 3/8, and 7/32 versus adding the decimal equivalents of those common fractions. In addition, making the metric system our everyday language will help students in science classes because metric has been the language used in science for years.
Metric system opponents also insist that consumers will get cheated during the changeover to metric because
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