The US Should Adopt the Metric System

so i've been checking the weather recently and uh i know you guys have probably noticed but it's starting to get a little chilly outside in the night i actually looked at the weather for next week and it's gonna get as low as eight degrees i know that's a little surprising but what if i did this to it changes a little bit right if i had said this phrase to anybody out of a group of 6.75 billion people on earth that's 94.7 percent of the population they would have known what i was talking about that's because that's how many people use the metric system the metric system is a system of measurements used by almost every everybody on earth not including the united states and two other countries the united states should adopt the metric system and the americans should implement it into their daily lives why you might ask because it will educationally and scientifically connect us with the rest of the world my family's from england so i travel there quite often and i'm always really frustrated at the fact that there's so many conversions that have to take place for me to even function in that country and so today we're going to be talking about the problems with using both metric and imperial at the same time how we can adopt the metric system into the united states and the benefits we will reap from it so first we're going to start with the problems and a lot of the problems can be seen in the daily lives of people great britain is actually having a big problem with this right now some shopkeepers are still using the empirical system while most have switched to the metric system so put yourself in this situation you walk into a store and you're going to buy potatoes and potatoes are a british pound per kilogram now you go into another store and they're selling the same potatoes but for a british pound per pound now this can be very confusing for customers and the market itself when trying to balance it the uk metric association an association dedicated to the metrification of the united kingdom on their website talks about some of the problems that can be seen in schools and the workplace in the schools mainly it's about the kids there's so many wasted hours teaching both of these systems that they might not even use one of them and that time could be going to some other things that they might teach them and in the workplace a lot of people use the metric system in their work for example engineers might use metric to measure certain things but then when they go out in the real world they have to switch their minds to empirical this can be very confusing and so those are some of the daily life problems but there are some very major problems that we've seen in the past this is the mars climate orbiter it was built and sent off into space in 1998 it was built to monitor the climate of mars and specifically to see if mars had water on its surface but september 23 1999 we lost contact with it and it plummeted to mars the reason because of a miscommunication between if the spacecraft was using metric or empirical and they miscalculated the trajectory now you might be asking why this matters the price of the project 327.6 million dollars so as you can see there are a couple of problems with using both empirical and metric system and these all can be solved by adopting it now adopting it includes a procedure called metrification metrification is exactly what it sounds like it's the country adopting the metric system and how the united states might do this we can look to other countries to see how we might do this one option is the big bang method which india used in the 1960s and the big bang method is exactly what it sounds like it's very sudden and all at once in 1960 india outlawed the use of non-metric systems and allowed the use of metric systems the process only took two years and they had completely metrified the entire country another method is called the phase-in method which can be seen in great britain and japan now both of these countries started their metrification process in the late 1800s and just by the title of it it's a slower process you slowly build metric into your society japan's process took 70 years and as i said before great britain is still having a problem with this the bbc news on their website on an article about the metrification of the united kingdom talks about their specific process first they started in education by teaching the children about the metric system then they nurtured the knowledge by using outside sources and then they implemented in other places such as highway signs and products now some of you might be asking haven't we already gone to metric you know i see metric sometimes in my daily life well david smith a a graduate of cambridge in his online article metric conversion how soon looked into american products and found that 30 of them actually already use metric for example this is a bottle of shampoo which as you can see uses the empirical measurement 23.7 fluid ounces but also in parentheses uses the metric 700 milliliters but this isn't enough you know we need to really get into it and by adopting the metric system we can reap some of the benefits one of the main benefits is it's easier to understand linda anderman a metric enthusiast on her website more than a mile behind looks back at when metric was first invented metric the metric system was invented in the 1790s during the napoleonic era in france she looked at the european literacy rate and found it was only 60 percent at the time so the metric system was specifically designed to be easy to understand by anybody whether or not you could read and this right here is a graph comparing the empirical system to the metric system in conversions here we see the imperial system inches to a foot feet to a yard yards to a mile an ounces to a pound it's all over the place but on the other side we have the metric system which is based on prefixes and everything's based on tens hundreds and thousands we have millimeters to a meter is a thousand meters to a kilometer a thousand grams to a kilogram a thousand everything's concise and it's a lot easier to convert another benefit we can see from adopting the metric system is unification with the whole world as i said at the beginning a lot of the world uses it this is a map of the metrification of planet earth the red colors represent very early metrification and the green colors represent recent metrification the black countries united states liberia and burma are the only countries on earth that have not officially adopted the metric system unfortunately liberia and burma recently have uh have been reporting that they're using the metric system so we are the only country in on earth that has not officially adopted metric system and so we've talked about the problems with using both the empirical and the metric system at the same time how we can adopt it and how we can see other countries and their adoption process and how we can do that and the benefits that we can see from adopting the metric system now i know it might seem trivial to adopt the metric system but it just makes sense and it's one more thing that we can put on the list of things that connects us as a human race and it's one less thing separating us from becoming one unified human race

Channel: BelmontSpeechLab

Views: 506,126

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Id: _L-SfeGN82A

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 23 2014