Stephen,
Irish family grocers and butchers are going metric. Through the years I see more and more Irish butchers stop butchering the metric system and adopt it, some use metric and Imperial. The number of butchers using Imperial only is decreasing. Their scales are always metric.
When speeds and petrol pumps are metric, it is absolutely ridiculous to continue expressing fuel consumption in mpg, as it means that people have to make unneccesary calculations. Converting km to miles and litres to gallons or converting the mpg to litres per 100 km. In this era of sky-high fuel prices people need to know their fuel consumption.
For some time after Ireland went metric at the petrol pump, I saw special offfers still expressed in pence per gallon while the pumps were in litres (some time before the Euro was adopted in Ireland). Such offers were then more and more expressed in pence per litre, now in cents per litre.
I have never looked at gallons delivered in my own country, because that is The Netherlands, where the gallon is unknown and outlawed and has never been used at petrol pumps. I do not have a car.
I DO look what measuring instruments have to say. I absolutely avoid modern measuring instruments in Imperial and dual ones. When I buy a modern thermometer I insist on having a Celsius only or a Celsius - Kelvin one. I would only accept Fahrenheit or inHg on an antique instrument.
Han
----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen Humphreys" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2005 3:31 PM
Subject: [USMA:32597] RE: UK is more imperial than some think
>then Ireland has been more metric than the UK for years.
Did you check out the family butchers/grocers etc?
We averaged 36 mpg." I wonder at what pump they got their gallons of fuel!
I know of no-one that fills their car with either gallons or litres.
They fill up, or top up their tanks.
Or they put in "moneys worth" - eg 20 quid, 40 quid etc.
Gone are the days (if they existed) when you stopped, stayed in your car, and said "put 5 gallons in" - and even then I'd wager a bet they'd hand over a ten pound note and said "put that much in".
Seriously! Think about it! When did you last look at the delivered gallons or litres to get a whole number? Would you put in 10 litres and hand over eight pounds and thirty nine pence?
Or put in ten pounds worth?
