On 18/02/2018 22:25, ultred ragnusen wrote:


That's strange that Europeans use a half-metric half-what-you-call-Imperial
standard of units.

Not necessarily the rest of Europe but the UK.

I'm now retired and during my schooling it was mainly the metric system
that was taught.

In the UK we still use a imperial units for some items. Beer in pubs is
sold in pints and not litres. Vehicle speed and road signs are still in
miles and not kilometres. Manufactures/dealers still refer to petrol
consumption in miles per gallon even though petrol has been sold by the
litre for 3 decades or more.

I was an engineer by profession and only used metric my whole working
life for the job.

Some non-metric items are throwback to history - they have been that way
for hundreds of years and haven't changed.

To us, Imperial is a strange word, where it often means Imperial Japan or
Imperial British (meaning before WWII in our vernacular), but we never use
the word "imperial" in terms of measurement units (at least I don't).

I have seen "imperial gallons" where I have to ask what they are, since we
just have gallons and liters and nothing else (similarly with regular tons
and long tons I guess).

We only say gallons BUT when talking to the ex-colonies we have to say
'Imperial' because your pints and gallons are different from ours.

1 imperial (UK) pint = 1.2 US pint
1 imperial (UK) gallon = 1.2 US gallons

There is also the tonne = 1,000 kg

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