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Suppose, a litre of cola costs US$3.15. If you buy one third of a litre of cola, how much would you pay?
The above may seem like a rather basic question. Something that you would perhaps expect the vast majority of adults to be able to answer? Particularly if they are allowed to use a calculator.
Unfortunately, the reality is that a large number of adults across the world struggle with even such basic financial tasks (the correct answer is US$1.05, by the way).
[...] In many other countries, the situation is even worse. Four in every ten adults in places like England, Canada, Spain and the US can't make this straightforward calculation – even when they had a calculator to hand. Similarly, less than half of adults in places like Chile, Turkey and South Korea can get the right answer.
-- submitted from IRC
High number of adults unable to do basic mathematical tasks
(Score: 4, Insightful) by schad on Friday March 16 2018, @02:30AM (22 children)
If you're going to make fun of US customary units, don't choose liquid volume. It actually maps pretty closely, and easily, to metric values. For instance, a gallon is pretty close to 4 liters, which I know because a US quart -- a quarter of a gallon, of course -- is very nearly 1 liter. Instead, pick units of length. An inch is too big, but there's nothing smaller, so we work in fractions. Feet and yards are fine, but then there's nothing up until a mile, which is 5280 feet (there's a nice round number for you). The metric system is much better.
And if you're going to make fun of us dumb Americans for our ignorance of the metric system, definitely don't use liters as your example. The bottle of soda you buy at the grocery store is 2 liters. The big bottle you get from the vending machine is 1 liter. I'd wager that most Americans have a better grasp of how big "2 liters" is than "half a gallon." If you want to pick on our ignorance, use temperature. We can sort of grasp units of length; a meter is roughly a yard, so a kilometer is roughly 3000 feet, which is less than a full mile but more than half of one. Close enough to know that 10 km is a pretty short drive and 500 km is most of a day. But temperature? Forget it. It's a bewildering mystery to us.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Fluffeh on Friday March 16 2018, @02:46AM (2 children)
Wow. I think the biggest soda I have seen in a vending machine is 600ml (Just over a half litre) and most vending machines sell cans of soft drink - which are 375ml (roughly a third of a litre). I would say if anyone was going to tease American's it would now be about the absurdly large sizes of soft drinks sold in vending machines?
*sips 250ml coffee*
(Score: 2) by schad on Friday March 16 2018, @04:02AM
Maybe I'm not remembering correctly. Cans (12 fl oz) are most common, followed by regular-size bottles (500ml). I could swear I've seen 1L bottles in vending machines before, but thinking about how big they would be, perhaps not.
We Americans do love our carbonated corn syrup delivery vehicles. Though reading about the native drinks that some other countries have... yeesh. Ours might actually be healthy by comparison.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @12:28PM
Cans are 355mL or 345mL in Canada.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @03:08AM (8 children)
Degrees F = (9/5*Degrees C)+32
Not hard to remember.
1 inch = 2.54cm
1m = 39.3 inches
1km ~= 0.68mi
easy peasy
1l = 33.8 fl. oz
no sweat
1kg=2.2 lbs
454g = 1lb
28.37g = 1 oz.
Can of corn
I'm an American and all of those came from memory. I learned that stuff in elementary school 40+ years ago.. WTF were you doing?
This shit ain't hard. Just pay attention! No. don't look at the shiny object, pay attention!
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday March 16 2018, @05:21AM (5 children)
40 plus years ago there was a push to convert to metric. I remember in grade school in the mid-70s some of that and freeway signs showing distance in both mi and km. 30 plus years ago, that all went away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:25AM
More's the pity.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday March 16 2018, @10:33AM (3 children)
It was Saint [newrepublic.com]Reagan [vanityfair.com] that did in general use of metrics in the US. Eventually the few companies still doing manufacturing inside the US had to switch anyway [us-metric.org] for cost reasons. So the situation is more of a hyrbid model with a few areas, such as road signs, where the old system remains in use for a while longer. I can see a lot of reasons why the US might go fully metric in the coming decades.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 17 2018, @12:08AM (2 children)
There's nothing worse than having to use both standard and metric in the same gadget-factory. Even worse than that is having a product line with different sizes and having one standard and the others metric. Even worse than that is using both standard and metric on each of a type of product. Don't laugh, the latter exists, albeit rarely.
(Score: 1) by canopic jug on Saturday March 17 2018, @06:25AM
That might explain the combination of metric and standard nuts I found on a car's starter motor when replacing it a long time ago.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @11:15AM
How about getting dimensionless drawings in?
Normally worked in mm (UK here), used to get customer drawings in with just numbers on them, then it's a game of contacting them to find out they're in cm, inches, feet...even had one where the customer said the length was 2 yards, and the width 4 cm....just as well I'm already bald.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Friday March 16 2018, @06:56AM (1 child)
Yeah, no wonder that you Americans have no space left in your brains for useful information. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @09:46PM
I could wax philosophical about those charming Brits with their Brexit, bad teeth and poor personal hygeine, not to mention warm beer, but I'll take the high road instead.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kazzie on Friday March 16 2018, @06:10AM (2 children)
There are rods, chains, and furlongs in between, but few people are familiar with them these days.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 16 2018, @11:12AM (1 child)
Yes, and more importantly, if you understand the history of rods, chains, and furlongs, you'll also understand why a mile is exactly 5280 feet. (It's not just a random number chosen arbitrarily.)
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday March 16 2018, @03:15PM
Kind of disappointed nobody is actually saying what the conversions are. 1 mi = 8 furlongs, 1 furlong = 10 chains, 1 chain = 4 rods, and 1 rod = 5.5 yards. The reason for that fraction?
Now I'm mad that we could have had nice round 4800 ft miles if it weren't for some English king deciding to change the length of a foot [wikipedia.org].
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @11:00AM
> but then there's nothing up until a mile, which is 5280 feet (there's a nice round number for you).
Blame the Romans -- mile is English for mille which is 1000 -- 1000 double paces of a short Roman soldier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman_mile [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @02:19PM
That is categorically not "what she said."
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Friday March 16 2018, @08:11PM (1 child)
0 Celcius = water freezes
100 Celcius = water boils
25 Celcius = room temperature
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @11:23AM
25 C? if my rooms were at that sort of temperature I'd be doing my best Margaret Hamilton imprersonation..
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @09:36PM (1 child)
Really? You've never bought a half-gallon of milk or juice, and can't visualize half of a whole gallon?
As for lengths - a centimeter is too big for most things as well, so you're still dealing with fractions, probably mm, which are really too small for almost anything. As for the commonness of fractional inch rulers rather than decimal inches - fractions are *extremely* useful for building things, where you quite frequently need to divide measurements in half, and a fractional ruler lets you do that relatively seamlessly - of course you've got to be comfortable with at least binary fractions to use it well, and most Americans seem to have trouble with ANY fractions. Plus it makes comparing measurements of different precision rather arduous (how does 17/64ths compare to 3/8ths?). You can easily get fractional centimeter rulers if you do a lot of construction, or decimal inch rulers if you just do measurements, though fractional inches remain the norm, probably mostly for reasons of cultural inertia at this point.
Temperature is certainly a challenge, but that's mostly because it's almost impossible to visualize, in any system. I mean sure water freezes at 0C and boils at 100C, but where do "cold" "warm" and "hot" fall on that scale? Fahrenheit is actually a bit better, as it was calibrated to local extremes in some locale - 0F is bitter cold, 100F is hot, 50F is cool. And lets not even talk about Kelvin/Rankine - they at least have 0 defined as the absolute lowest temperature possible, but it lies so far outside human experience as to be useless for non-scientific purposes.
How about weights? US units don't don't even consistently maintain integer ratios: 16oz to a pound, or 7000 grain for smaller measures (So 437.5 grain to an ounce) and again with the weird ratios in 2240 lb to a ton - there's also some intermediate units nobody uses, probably for the best as they don't use any sort of consistent ratios either - 14 lb to a stone, 28lb to a quarter, and 112lb to a hundredweight (explain *that* one to me). Then you've got slug at 32.2 pounds, the independent unit of mass since the units of weight introduce far too much complexity into scientific calculations. But hey, at least the ton is almost the same weight as the metric tonne...
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday March 16 2018, @09:59PM
Americans don't use stones or quarters. [wikipedia.org] I've never actually heard anyone use hundredweight as a unit, but they're 100lbs, whereas a long hundredweight is 112 lbs.
In common usage, ounces, pounds, tons. That's about it.
As an American, I think we should all use SI [wikipedia.org] units, but I won't hold my breaath.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @01:39PM
But 5280 *is* a nice round number. It divides evenly by like 42 different factors. Very convenient.