[USMA:35265] Odd mixture of units on Aussie program for US market

[Ezra Steinberg]

Here's an open question to Pat McNaughtin about a program I just saw tonight on PBS ...   The program in question was about the effects of wild fires on plants an animals. It featured wild fires in Australia but later talked about wild fires elsewhere. The narrator sounded Australian and the show included news footage from what I presume was ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp) concerning the Australian wild fires and later the wild fires in California that were discussed.   The two odd things I noticed were in the news footage and in the program narration. The news footage (with voice-over by the Australian reporter) repeatedly mentioned the size of the fire in "acres", but then talked (as I expected) about the temperature in Celsius. Can you tell us, Pat, if Australian news media still refer to large land areas in "acres" rather than "hectares" (or better "square kilometers")?   In the program narration I heard what sounded like an arbitrary mixture of Imperial and metric. Examples of the first were "miles", "feet" and "gallons of petrol", whereas I also heard "centimeters", "meters", and "degrees Celsius". So, distance was at different times described in Imperial and at other times in metric with no apparent rhyme or reason.   I didn't watch the final credits so I don't know the names of the organizations that produced the show, but I am presuming it was destined for the American market (at least this version of the program), which I assume (hope?) explains the use in some parts of Imperial units. Should I deplore the fact that part of the narration used Imperial units or should I rejoice that metric is so ingrained in the Australian psyche that at least some of the time metric surfaced in the narration despite the intention of the producers (if I'm guessing right) to provide a narration strictly for a US audience?   Cheers, Ezra