> To all Canadians on this list: > > In your experience with immigrants, how much effort do they put into learning FFU?
A lot depends on where they came from, and the extent to which FFU was ever used in their country of origin, if at all. Still, because certain items in Canada are mearsured in FFU, they end of learning the FFU measurements out of necessity, and simple exposure. > With road signs, maps and automobile instrumentation in kilometres and metres, do > immigrants bother to learn miles and if they do, do they have a comfort level with > them? I'd have to say no, they don't learn miles as there are few references to them in Canada, anymore. > > With gasoline sold by the litre, weather forecasts in metric units and store scales > in kilograms, do immigrants bother to become familiar with FFU? Well, store scales are in kg, but most produce and meats are advertised and displayed with their price per pound in large print (and the price per kilogram) in very small print. Additionally, some items sold in Canada are packaged for the US market, so on Saturday, when I purchased a 3.78 L can of paint, the salesman in the store referred to it as a gallon of paint (despite the fact the prior to metrication, Canada used imperial gallons, not US gallons). > > When one comes from a metric country and goes to another country where metric is > used I would suspect the person would just continue to use metric as he already has > experience with it. Is this the experience of immigrants to Canada? A co-worker of mine is from Germany. He uses metric primarily, except that he uses ifp for things like the size of his property (it's an 80' x 100' lot), he knows the size of his house in square feet because that is how houses are marketed, he knows his height in feet and his weight in pounds because thats how clothes are sold. Stephen
