The metric system is a decimal based measuring system. The United States is the only industrialized country in the world which is not using this system. On September 23, 1999 a $125 million Mars orbiter crashed into the planet because some engineers were still using english units. Ridiculous.
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Converting back and forth between metric and english is not a useful way to get used to the metric system. If you are interested in the conversions, you'll have to look elsewhere.
What I'll list here are some common metric measurements and how they relate to things around you.
Most adults are between 1.5 and 2 meters tall. Danny DeVito is about 1.53 m tall. Tim Robbins is about 1.96 m tall. I am 1.77 m tall. Of course none if this helps if you don't know these people.
A plain M&M® is about a centimeter in diameter. A CD jewel box is a centimeter thick. A standard paper clip is usually 3 cm long and 1 mm thick.
The United States is roughly 4000 km wide (from coast to coast). It is about 550 km from San Francisco to L.A, 2950 km from San Francisco to Chicago, and 4150 km from San Francisco to New York. The circumference of the earth is almost exactly 40000 km.
A moderate sized beverage is about 250 ml. You would be hard pressed to find a beverage much smaller than 300 or 400 ml at a fast food restaurant. You already know how big a 2 l bottle is.
Compact cars can generally go 100 km on about 8 l of gas. Sport utility vehicles need 20-25 l to go that far.
A liter of water has a mass of one kilogram. (Actually, the density of water changes with temperature, so this relationship is not exact, but at 5°C it's accurate to 0.01% and it's never off by more than 5% between 0°C and 100°C at atmospheric pressure.)
Most healthy people are between 50 and 100 kg. Really only football players should be near 100 kg or more.
Most people already know that water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C. Human body temperature is 37°C, so when it's 40°C outside, it feels really hot.
Room temperature is 20 to 25°C: 20°C is a little on the cool side, and 25°C is a little on the warm side.
When it's 30°C outside you may want to consider shorts. When it's 10°C you'll want to have a jacket. Of course 0°C is freezing, but it's not really cold until it gets down to -10°C. If it's -20°C you don't want to go outside.
You're already familiar with the standard metric unit of time: the second, so I won't give you any examples here.
My friend Dan and I thought it would be interesting to have a decimal time system, dividing the day into 1000 units. We called these units ticks. Later we found out that Swatch had already come up with almost exactly the same idea. They call their unit of time an Internet Beat. They even made watches that keep that time.
The main difference between Internet Time and our decimal time is the time zone: Internet Time advocates doing away with time zones; we advocate starting the day at what you know as 4:00am. We chose that time because, realistically, no one should get up before or go to bed after 4:00am. With our system, noon (when the sun is highest) is at about 333, your work day should end about 550, you'll probably think about going to bed soon after 750, unless you're a college student, in which case you won't go to bed until at least 850 or even 900.
This isn't just a wild idea, though. Okay, maybe it is. Anyway, at some point I'll put up a decimal clock for you here (I used to have a Java applet, but it was a bit cumbersome).
The United States Metric Association is working hard for metrication. (Why we need a special word for the process of converting to metric is beyond me.)