Wait, 40 degrees is hot?
Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
My name is Dr. C and on today's episode, we will be discussing America's difficulty with the metric system.
Now, if you are in any country besides the United States, you most likely use the magic system and are completely comfortable with it.
However, if you are an American, you probably struggle with the magic system.
I can say this from personal experience, so if this is your first time joining on the podcast or if you don't know anything about me, a little bit about my background.
I am a high school science teacher and I have my graduate and undergraduate degrees in science.
So I have a lot of history with the magic system.
I took a lot of science classes and had to learn how to use the magic system and I teach it every year to my students.
And I can tell you from personal experience, it is an absolute nightmare.
Teaching my students the magic system is one of my least favorite things to do the entire year.
And the reason is because they struggle so much with it.
I usually have students who are in their second or third year of high school.
So by the time they've gotten to me, they have taken science classes and they have been exposed to and introduced to the metric system in each of those science classes.
So usually when I get them, it's their fourth or fifth time learning the magic system.
And even though they have seen it a number of times, they just don't understand it.
They just do not understand how the system is based on 10s and they have the most difficult time converting and knowing what the prefixes mean.
Now, if you are from a country that uses the metric system, that is probably crazy to you.
You probably do not understand why Americans think it's so difficult, but I can tell you that my students do.
It's not even converting between the American units Fahrenheit, miles, feet, inches, ounces into metric units, but it's converting within metric units themselves.
So let's say for example, I asked them to convert one kilogram to grams.
You would think that would be somewhat straightforward, but no, it is not.
You will get answers ranging from 100 to 25 to negative seven.
Where did the negative sign come from?
How is that possible?
But it is. And I don't know why.
I don't know why it's so difficult for my students to convert and to understand what the prefixes mean and move the decimal backwards and forwards, but they really struggle.
They really struggle and they really feel uncomfortable when they're using the metric system and they have a difficult time when they are trying to explain it or use it or measure with it.
So the question is why, why is it that Americans have such a hard time with this?
And there's a number of reasons.
I actually discussed this with my students and I asked them why they think the United States has not switched over from the American customary units to metric units.
And I get a number of responses.
I know that my students aren't the entire United States population.
I know that it's a relatively small sample, but I think how they feel and I think that their ideas are a pretty good indicator, a pretty good sampling of how Americans feel in general about the metric system and why the United States has not converted over to it.
So before we get into the reasons why, I wanted to go over a little bit of background information, a little bit about the history of the units in the United States.
In the United States, we use American customary units and you will almost always hear this called Imperial system.
The Imperial system was from Britain.
It's based off of the British Empire system of units.
And this system was developed in the 1800s.
If you know anything about the United States, you will know that we declared our independence from Great Britain in 1776.
So when the Imperial system was created and standardized, the United States was no longer a part of Britain.
So even though it gets called the Imperial system and we say that we use the Imperial system, we actually use the American customary units.
They're very similar.
The units have their origins in Great Britain and because of our history as a British colony, we do have very similar units and very similar measurements.
There's a lot of overlap, but they're not exactly the same.
However, you will see it get called the Imperial system almost everywhere.
So a little bit about the history of the metric system in the United States.
There has been interest in using the system for centuries.
During the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific resolution that was occurring across the globe in the 1800s, there was a consensus that weights and measures should be standardized, that there should be some standardization so that everyone knew what a certain measurement meant.
There was interest in the United States to help join this and there were surveys done to try to analyze the cost.
There were scientists and intellectuals who thought that it would be better if the United States joined in the effort to help create the standardization and the new system of units.
And there was some willingness in terms of Congress to get people to adopt the metric system.
So in 1866, there was something called the Metric Act that was passed in the United States.
This act did not force anyone or encourage anyone to use the metric system.
In hindsight, maybe it should have, but it didn't.
What it did was that it allowed for the legalization of using the metric system in the United States.
This meant that people who used it, businesses, institutions who used it, could not be sued and they could not get in trouble for using the metric system.
But again, it didn't force people to convert over to that system.
With each passing year, more and more people were using the metric system and then you get the actual international system of units that was created and that made for the standardization process.
After this occurred, the United States really became more aware of how far it had fallen behind in terms of using the metric system and getting on board with this new system of units.
There was a lot of push in the 1960s with the new adaptation of the international system of units that the United States should convert.
There was a lot of talk that the United States should convert when this happened.
And I can tell you that my mom remembers this.
She was a student in the 1960s and she remembers being told that they had to learn the metric system, but the United States was going to convert and that they had to start using this system every day.
Well, we can say it's been decades since then and that definitely has not happened.
But at the time, there was a lot of talk about it happening.
There was some push from the 1960s and the 1970s to really try to get into that system and start using it.
With all of this talk about converting and trying to use the metric system, Congress decided to pass the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.
It was signed into law by President Ford and the purpose of it was, what the name implies, trying to get the United States to convert over to the metric system.
Again, it's been a number of decades since this act was passed and we still have not converted over to that system.
So what happened? Why is it that there was all of this interest, there was all of this talk about the metric system and converting over.
But decades later, we're still using feet, inches, pounds and Fahrenheit.
So the number one reason I get is that we are used to our current system.
I definitely think this is true when I see how much my students struggle with the metric system and understanding what the units mean.
And I also see this with myself.
I have a science degree.
I have been teaching science for a number of years.
I have a lot of personal experience with the metric system.
I'm comfortable using Celsius.
I can convert Celsius in Fahrenheit relatively easily.
I'm comfortable with kilometers.
I can convert them between miles and kilometers relatively easily.
But again, it's a conversion.
And the analogy I like to make is that if you're learning English, how when you try to speak and you're not very advanced in the language, how you have to convert, how you have to translate, so you might think in your native language and then translate and then speak in English.
And that's how my brain works when I'm talking about temperature or distance, when I'm trying to report out in Celsius or kilometers, for example.
I have to convert that to the system that I know.
And then I can understand what those measurements mean.
I'm not fluent in the metric system.
I guess I could say I don't think in the metric system.
I have to do that intermediate step of converting in my head before I can understand what a measurement means.
And I'm not great when it comes to smaller units of measurement.
I'm not very comfortable with centimeters or with reporting my height and meters.
To me, that's very strange because I've always done it in feet and inches.
So if you asked me my height and meters, I don't know that off the top of my head.
Now, I could figure it out.
Of course, I could do the conversion.
But that's not some information that I have readily available to myself.
And the same thing with how many grams something is.
If you told me that you had 100 grams of something, I don't know what that means.
I again, I could sit and I can convert that to ounces.
But just when you just tell me 100 grams, I don't have a point of reference for that.
That's not something that I easily understand.
And I'm a scientist.
I'm a person who took a number of science classes.
I'm a person who teaches science.
And I struggle. So I can only imagine how much other people struggle.
I see how much my students struggle.
And I know people like my grandparents age, my parents age.
Anybody who's not a science major, they have no point of contact with the metric system.
They never use it in their daily life.
And so when you try to get them to use it, they have no idea what you're talking about.
You see this when people travel to other countries.
You see this when Americans travel to other countries.
They struggle with weights and measurements.
Because we don't use that system.
And so I can understand how people would not be comfortable.
How people would not want to switch over to a system where they have no idea what something means.
If you don't really need the metric system, if everything around you is in the imperial system or in American customer units, there might not be an incentive to really learn the metric system.
If you're not going to travel outside of the United States, if you're not in science, if you don't need the metric system, why bother learning it?
I could definitely understand why someone would have that opinion and why someone wouldn't want to put the time in to learn the system that they don't need to use.
The second common reason why my students say that we haven't converted over has to do with money.
And I definitely think that this is a major reason.
So in the United States, everything is in our system of units.
Everything. So when you think of, for example, gas stations, gas stations, if you look at the price, if you come to a gas station in the United States, the price is per gallon, not per liter.
So the signs would have to change.
The pumps would have to change.
When you go to a grocery store and you weigh your produce or the cashier weighs your produce, that's in pounds.
So all of those scales would have to change and go over to kilograms.
All of our road signs that when you're driving on the freeway and they tell you how far the next city is or how close you are to the next exit, those are all in miles.
Those would all have to change over to kilometers.
When you look at packaging for businesses, those are in ounces and you would have to convert that over.
And so you can start thinking when as a whole, as everything that needs to be changed in the entire country, that would be a lot of money.
That would be extremely significant.
That would be a high amount of money.
And who's going to pay for that?
Would taxpayers want their tax dollars to go to changing to a system that they don't see the point of using and that they don't even understand?
Would you want to pay for your road signs to get converted over to kilometers if you don't know what a kilometer is?
So you're going to pay money to get signs converted so that you don't understand what they are.
Even speedometers, odometers in the United States when you're looking at a car, it says the number of miles on the car or how fast you're traveling in miles per hour, all of that would have to change.
And I don't know if the government would be able to subsidize every business that had to change something over.
I don't think American taxpayers would want to fund it.
And so the question becomes who would pay for it and what's the incentive for that?
I can see the argument of how that would be too expensive and that would cost too much money and how it would not happen just based on the monetary factor alone.
And I definitely think it's a major factor why the United States has not switched over to the system.
And the last reason that I always hear from students is that Americans like being different.
Americans like being American and they like being unique and they like their culture and their way of life.
And I, again, I can understand this one because Americans tend to have a lot of pride in what they do and how our country is.
And so if we have our own system, maybe we don't want to convert over because we're proud of our system or we like our system.
So if you go to someone and say we need to convert over because the rest of the world is doing it, that's not always a convincing argument.
Maybe people actually like our system because it's the American system, because it's unique for us and we like being individualistic and a little bit different.
So trying to get people to convert over because the rest of the world is doing it is not necessarily an effective argument and might not work to convince people to use it.
Those are the main reasons I hear from students why they think we have not converted over to the metric system.
And I definitely believe that those are the main reasons as well.
When you take into account that it's a system that people don't fully understand, at least that Americans don't fully understand, and you add that with the cost that it would, it would cost the amount of money it would take to switch over completely to this completely different system of units, you
can understand why we have not converted over yet.
Personally, I don't believe that the United States will be converting over anytime soon.
Maybe I should be more optimistic and hope that we do, but I don't see it happening.
I don't think there's an incentive and I don't think there's a want from the American public in general to switch over.
So if you are coming to the United States on vacation, or if you are moving here, please just know we use our own system of units.
Maybe try to figure out what Fahrenheit inches and ounces means before you get here.
So you are not completely lost and confused by our system.
If you're watching on YouTube, please leave a comment in the comment section below.
Tell me what do you find frustrating about the imperial system or the American system of units?
What is confusing for you?
I would love to hear about it from someone who has a different perspective and someone who does not use the same unit system that I do.
If you are enjoying this podcast, if you're finding the topics interesting and helpful, please leave a review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast on.
Like and subscribe so you don't miss our next episode when it comes out next week.
And until then, keep learning English!
