If you go to buy carpet that costs $10 a yard and you need 100 square feet, could you figure out how much it will cost? Which is more, 2 quarts, 5 pints or 36 fl oz? How many pints are in a gallon? How many pounds equal 200 ounces? Which drill is larger, the 13/64, the 1/4 or the 5/32? If you have a problem figuring the answers to these questions, then your problem is the English Imperial System. You may ask yourself, why should the U.S. convert to the metric system? The answer is simple: because it's much easier to use. The metric system is an improvement over the English system in two ways: one unit of measurement for each physical quantity, and the decimal system.
An example of one unit of measurement for each physical quantity is length. In the Imperial system, you have: inch, foot, yard, mile, fathom, rod, furlong, league, etc. In the Metric Length System, you have a single root word-meter, which is then prefixed by one of the following to decrease or increase the amount: micro, milli, centi, deci, deca, hecto, kilo, mega. Another example is in the unit of Mass. In The Imperial system you have: pound, apothecary pound, ounce, apothecary ounce, dram, apothecary dram, grain, spothecary scruple, etc. As before in the metric system, you have a single root word-gram, which is prefixed by one of the following: micro, milli, centi, deci, etc.
By converting to the metric system, we would also standardize the use of the Decimal system. This allows conversion between units without doing math. All you have to do is shift a decimal point. For example, to convert 1852 meters to kilometers, all we have to do is shift the decimal point 3 places to the left, which gives us 1.852 kilometers. To convert back, we just shift 3 places to the right again. Another example is converting 160,934.4 centimeters to kilometers by moving the decimal point 2 places left from centi to meter, then another 3 places left to kilo which gives us 1.
