On Monday 30 November 2009 11:54:25 Bill Hooper wrote: > We were talking about school children not specialists. I agreed that > teaching conversion may be a useful process to learn, but it should wait > until algebra and it could be used to convert units OTHER THAN Olde English > units. (I gave a number of examples in my earlier reply.) Once the process > is learned, it can be adapted for use with ANY units, Ye Olde English ones > or any other, no matter how archaic. When the specialist encounters the > situation, he or she will be able to handle it at that time. It was not > necessary for the would-be-specialist to know how to do it with Old English > units way back when they were still grade school students.
All but two of your examples (the case and the kilowatt-hour) are from one metric unit to another with the conversion factor being a power of ten. How about using ancient units? Here are some possible problems. A shekel is 11+2/3 grams and an ephah is 22 liters. How many shekels of water are in an ephah? (To make it more complicated, state the number of cabs in an ephah, and ask how many shekels are in a cab.) An ardeb is XXX grams and an arura is XXX square meters. The tax on wheat during Ptolemaic times was XXX ardebs per arura. Epchois mes Bohair has a 5-hectare wheat field which produces XXX kilograms of wheat. If the tax were still in effect, what portion of his crop would he have to pay in tax? Pierre -- li ze te'a ci vu'u ci bi'e te'a mu du li ci su'i ze te'a mu bi'e vu'u ci
