A Simple International System In The United States

A lone giant, the United States still uses an arcane and arbitrarily defined system of measurements despite the fact the that the world has adopted a simple international system. That arbitrary system, regrettably still in use, is the US Customary/Imperial System where miles, gallons, pounds, and Fahrenheit all call home. This simple international system is The International System of Units, or what we colloquially refer to as the metric system. The US customary system is too complex with a multitude of names for units and difficult methods of conversion between those units. We are also stuck in this hybrid system of metric and customary units because of our past attempts at total metrication which can lead to confusion for our citizens. Our
The number of names for a quantity, such as volume, is very lengthy in the US customary system. The quantities for measuring volume include: gallons, quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, ounces, and many others that we do not care to remember. In the metric system it is just the liter for volume, that is all. In fact, you can know all of the quantities for the metric system for daily use by just learning that the meter is for distance, the liter is for volume, and the gram is for mass. Conversely, the US customary system requires you to learn a multitude of names just to know just the three quantities of distance, mass and volume. Furthermore, the US customary system has many conversion ratios while the metric system does not. In the US customary system, conversion ratios for distance include one mile equaling 1760 yards, one yard equaling three feet, and one foot equaling twelve inches. All of these conversions are different and have to memorized individually. However, the metric system has one method of conversion across all quantities and that is base-10 conversion. In the metric system there a prefixes that get attached to the quantities and these prefixes stand for the magnitude of the quantity such as the kilo-meter. The basic prefixes, with their respective magnitudes in parentheses, are kilo (1000), hecto (100), deca (10), then the base unit which has no prefix (1), followed by deci (0.1), centi (0.01), and milli (0.001). All of these are magnitudes of ten, which is where the term base-10 conversion derives from, and they only require you to move the decimal around with no arithmetic unlike the US customary system. To further illustrate the ease of conversion in the metric system, try to calculate how many feet are in 3.2 miles without a calculator. Most people probably cannot do this because they would have to know that there are