How we measure thing's in England.

In England we measure things weirdly and by weirdly I mean we use our units of weight, height, distance, water volume ect inconsistently, for example we weigh people differently to how we weigh ingredients for meals and I have no idea why we do this, I guess some things just stuck when we switched to metric, I don't know. 

I tried explaining this concept to an american who asked me how much I weighed in kilograms because he thought that we just use the metric system and I explained that we weighed people in stones, pounds and ounces and I just confused him even more and had to explain stones and it occurred to me that we (the English) over complicate how we measure things and I thought "Well if that guy was confused and didn't know what a stone in weight was there are probably plenty of other people who are just as confused."

So if you're either curious or confused I am going to attempt to explain.

 

First I will explain liquid volume, we measure different liquids differently.

We measure alcoholics drinks like beer and milk in pints and other liquids like water, bottled drinks and petrol/diesel (gas for vehicles) in litres and millilitres, a litre is the same as 1.75975 pints.

Height is sometimes measure in both metric and imperial , something like a building could be measured in both feet or metres whilst a person is usually measured in feet and inches,the lengths of objects and rooms are measured in metres and centimetres.

a foot is 30.48 centimetres and a metre is worth 100 centimetres.

 Distance like height is measured in both metric and imperial, long distances (like the distance between two cities or towns) are measured in both kilometres and miles whilst shorter distances (like something within sight) can be measured in metres, yards and feet.

1 mile is the same as 1.6 kilometres and a metre is 1.09 yards.

Weight is probably the most confusing of all, people are weighed in imperial and we use stones,pounds and ounces while the US use pounds.

A stone is worth 14 pounds so a woman of 8 stone would weigh 112 pounds for example.

We use milligrams, grams and kilograms for food (if you were using kilograms it would be meal for a large group meal like school dinner)

A gram is made up of 1000 milligrams and 1000 grams make up a kilogram. 

And we measure big things like cars in Kilograms or tons depending on how heavy it is , so if there was a week bridge there would be a sign to let you know how many tons or kilograms the bridge can take, an English ton is heavier than an american ton however. 

An English ton (or a long ton) is the same as 1016.05 kilograms so tons are used for larger things like buses and planes.

A uk ton weighs 2240 pounds where as an american (short ton) is more like 2000 pounds.

And that is about that really, if you are wondering about any other unit of measurement you can always ask me in the comments, be warned I'm not a mathematician but I'll do me best.