Yep, Americans purchase land in acres but manage it in hectares. The county records are in chains and furlongs. It's almost like we are trying to retard the movement to metric by keeping archaea alive. As if 1000 x 10 meters is hard to remember. Groan, I can hear it now- everybody knows what 5 acres should look like, but who really knows what 2 hectares is? hey, I know I need 1 meter of bandage dressing for every meter I fall of a ladder.
Heh Heh! +1 on the groan. I live in UK, but schoolboy times was in Africa (Rhodesia).
Everything in the shops was strongly influenced by what went on in RSA (South Africa), USA, and UK.
In South Africa, like in UK, the metric system started use in the 1800s, and was pretty much in place by the mid 1960s.
Leaving aside what happened in UK, in South Africa, they wanted to discourage multiple units systems, weights and measures in retail, etc, so they set in law that one could continue to use any units one was comfortable with, but that retail was metric. Sellers could provide conversions information, but the integer unit had to be the one in metric.
A garage conversion table had to be presented as numbers of litres, and the conversion unit with decimal fractions in gallons.
They also ruled that all new measuring stuff sold had to be metric. The tape, measure, the ruler, the micrometer, the lathe, the mill, whatever. A new one had to be sold metric. I came to UK, and found they were metric, with older folk hanging on to imperial.
On most of my posts here, I give a measure in both units, and also prices in both pounds and dollars
