Very dull Q. Imperial or metric and how old are you?

[IveGotASongThatllGetOnYNerves]

I'm 47 and have never got the hang of metric even though I wasn't even born when the UK introduced the metric system (apparently in 1965)

I'm in my 40s and use a mixture of both. When I weigh myself it's always in stones and lbs. Drives me bonkers when my DH and PIL change the bathroom scales to KG as they are used to that and they don't put them back to stones and lbs after! DH doesn't understand when I start talking about height in feet and inches either😅

Early 50s and I'm metric for most things - height, mass (mine and in the kitchen), temperature, running/walking/cycling distance. All that's left is pints of beer and speed/distance in the car. I switched to km for running a while ago, but still trying to get a feel for pace in kms instead of miles. Getting there though! Imperial just seems so backward.

I'm 55 and metric - but have lived on the continent for 20 years. I was surprised when talking to a similar-aged U.K. friend recently that they still think of temperatures in Fahrenheit (we see the British news and it seems to be in centigrade!). If I was still in the U.K. I'd definitely be thinking in imperial weights - it took a few goes to get used to giving my weight and height in cm/kg at the doctor's!

45. I grew up cooking in imperial but now use metric. People’s heights and weights are imperial, as is the distance to the next town. Curtains and sofas are measured in cm but my waist is in inches. All temperatures are centigrade.

48 and total mix and match here, even down to using ounces for cake making and dumplings, but grams for profiteroles and rice

Some British Imperial and American units are the same and some are different. The USA mostly uses the International Foot of 0.3048 metres but for surveying 40 of the 50 states use the US Survey Foot of 0.304 800 61 m. This resulted from a 1948 international change to the definition of the foot that the US Geological Survey (the national mapping agency) refused to accept. Apart from surveying, US miles yards, feet and inches are exactly the same as British ones.

US gallons are very different to Imperial gallons. At the time of the creation of the US republic weights and measures in the UK was in chaos. Each town had its own size gallon. The American chose the Winchester gallon of 231 cubic inches (3.785411784 litres) and made it their national standard.

In 1824 Britain by defining a national set of new 'statute' units and the gallon was defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water. This corresponds to 4.54609 L. Thus the US gallon is about 17% smaller than the Imperial gallon.

In both systems there are 8 pints in a gallon. A US pint is divided into 16 fluid ounces but an Imperial gallon is divided into 20 fluid ounces which makes US fluid ounces about 4% larger than Imperial ones.

Imperial ton, also known as the long ton, consists of 2240 pounds (1016.05 kg). The US ton, also known as the short ton consists of 2000 pounds (907.185 kg). In the SI metric system the tonne (known as the metric ton in the USA) is 1000 kg.

The Imperial long ton is no longer legal for trade in the UK and in any case is not very different to the tonne, but the US short ton is very different. Lots of scope for misunderstanding in international trade!

I am puzzled that almost everyone here is calling the degree Celsius 'Centigrade'. The name was changed in 1948 to avoid potential confusion with the grad, a unit of angle. Somehow the name Centigrade is persisting, but I am mystified as to why.

Height, weight, body measurements and distance - imperial
otherwise metric
(mid-late 50s)

Imperial for body weight and distance.
Metric for everything else (I think)
I'm 31.

nearly 60, imperial 🥴

The only one my head can't get around is metric for human heights. I know 1.8 is tall, 1.5 is short, I'm in the middle 1.7. But I struggle to figure out what the others 'mean'. I can translate between metric & imperial pretty easily otherwise.

I’m 46 and do a bit of both. I’m comfortable with either apart from temperatures which are always in °C.

I'm 68 and at school we used metric for science and Imperial for everything else. When I went to university in September 1974 I would use metric as far as possible. I assumed that the rest of the country would catch up to me soon enough. I was astonished when Margaret Thatcher abolished the Metrication Board and thereby derailed the metrication programme we had been following since 1965.

I have tried to stick to my principles, but for safety reasons my car is set to use miles per hour for the speedometer.

For fuel consumption I use centilitres per kilometer (cL/km), which is numerically equivalent to the litres per 100 km (L/(100 km) used on the continent but easier to write if you want to write metric correctly, with a space between the number and the unit symbol.

Let's say I want to know how much fuel I will use if I drive from Chelmsford to Cardiff. I look up the route on Google maps and set it to give me the distance in km. It tells me it's 317 km.
For planning purposes I assume my car does 6 cL/km, so that's 317 × 0.06 = 19 L. My tank holds 45 L so I can get there on a full tank but I should refuel before coming back, as I don't like to have less than a quarter of a tank of fuel.

For everything apart from the roads I use metric, although clothing is sometimes only labelled in Imperial. My job is with an engineering company that has used metric since I joined in 1978.

I switch between both. I'm 52. I went to school in the uk, France, Netherlands and USA!

I'll walk 2 miles to the shops in size 43 boots to buy a pint of milk and half a kilo of potatoes. I weight 13 stone but I'm 171 cm tall.

Late 40s and total mix-and-match.

Both, imperial for height and baby weight and some measurement

Metric for food weight and some measurement and distance

I can't work out old money

Mid 40's

Imperial for height, weight and distance

Metric for cooking.

I'm 48

Late 50s and can do both. Tend to prefer imperial, and def think in terms of miles, not kilometres.

40

Metric for the majority of things, but there are a few things where I can’t help but think in Imperial:

driving speeds and distance (not much choice in the UK to be fair!)

human heights and weights - although animals I do in metric

running distance past a 10k - half, full, and ultra marathons always seem to be in miles in this country. Anything below a 10k is in km

Sponge cake (6,6,6,3 in this house). All other cooking and baking is in metric but a sponge cake ratio is easier to remember in imperial

No idea how Fahrenheit works, I find it baffling tbh

40s. I'm so metric my family joke about my recipe for 454g cake.

The only imperial I use and am comfortable with is miles.

I am an Imperial girl!

The weather forecast was still using 'Centigrade' in the 80s, possibly into the 90s.

I'm in my mid-40s and completely metric. I have spent most of my adult life living in a metric country, so while I used to have a vague idea of how long it took to walk a mile or how tall someone was in feet by looking at them, that's all gone.

Sponge cake = 175g each of butter/flour/sugar (usually a bit less of the latter tbf) + 3 eggs.

Children's clothes here are in heights/height ranges (in cm) rather than age ranges. Much much more sensible. There's also less fretting along the lines of 'he's 4 and still in age 2-3 clothes, is something wrong with him?'

This is the UK - you seriously think we're going to get a foreign system like metric right ?

And that's not me being snippy (well, maybe a tad 😀). But 1970s metric used centigrade in schools. And on TV. It wasn't until the 80s they finally twigged. Presumably after a generation of Brits bamboozled the poor continentals by measuring temperature in divisions of an angle.

The centigrade->Celcius switch is up there with Peking->Beijing, Calcutta->Kolkata, and Ceylon->Sri Lanka at least for me.