I was listening to a call-in program on NPR (National Public Radio). While most of the callers are residents of the USA, this particular caller was from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The host was a bit surprised to be hearing from a Canadian and remarked that Halifax is reputed to have relatively mild winters compared to rest of Canada (Note from Ezra: aside from the Vancouver, British Columbia area), and then asked her what the current temperature was. When she told him it was -5 and the host responded “That’s not mild at all!”, she explained that she was using degrees Celsius. The host told her that that was about 25 degrees Fahrenheit, to which she replied “Well, that doesn’t mean anything to me.”
I have talked to other Canadians who are actually working down here in the States and who confess that they still have trouble understanding Fahrenheit even though they have been living down here for some time. If Canada, with its own continuing muddle due to a previous Conservative government putting the brakes on metrication mid-stream and with its proximity to the USA, can raise a generation that understands only degrees Celsius (because the media never uses Fahrenheit) and kilometers (since all the road signs use km and km/h), then surely the USA could metricate in short order if it followed Australia's example of how to do this. Sadly, our government shows little or no inclination to make this happen at this time. Ezra
