I would be delighted to see the metric system replace the pre-metric units currently in everyday use in the U.S. , even if area is expressed in chunks of 10,000 m^2!
Paul Trusten, Reg. Pharmacist Vice President U.S. Metric Association, Inc. Midland, Texas USA www.metric.org +1(432)528-7724 [email protected] On Mar 13, 2012, at 21:06, Paul Rittman <[email protected]> wrote: > What do people on this mailing list think of the hectare? I looked up a few > posts that were several years old, and it appears that some were for, some > against. At first sight, it appeared to me a very convenient form of land > measurement, being about the area of two American football fields put > together (easy to visualize), and convenient for measuring the size of most > lots and estates. The other measurements, the square meter and square > kilometer, seemed to produce numbers that were too large or too small, > especially since Americans are used to evaluating the size of estates in > terms of fractions of an acre, or tens or hundreds of acres (and very > occasionally thousands and millions of acres). > > Now, however, I’m having second thoughts. I recall in my reading of metric > advocates, at least one has proposed using only square meters and square > kilometers (and avoiding the hectare). The square m and km are a factor of a > million apart from each other (making for easier conversions), whereas the > hectare is 10,000 square meters, and I always forget how many hectares are in > a square kilometer. > > Introducing the hectare to Americans who are rather unfamiliar with the > metric system might give them one more term to use (and it loses the > simplicity of the metric system, in that it has the hect- prefix, but not the > base unit); simply using square meters and square kilometers would give them > more practice in the units that are already more common. > > The SI brochure (8th edition) places it in the non-SI units that are > acceptable (see page 124, Table 6. Non-SI units accepted for use with the > International System of Units). On page 117, it seems to prefer the square > meter, saying nothing about the square kilometer (itself of course being a > multiple of the square meter). > > So is what is the opinion here about the use of the hectare, specifically in > the United States? I realize that it is not common at all in real estate, but > my question is, is this a unit that should be used when exposing people to > the metric system? Or is this a unit that should be abandoned? I’d say junk > it, but I just hate using numbers that are either incredibly small or > incredibly large, for lots that are in the ½ to 50 acre range, for instance. > > Today I told my students about a large land grant in the American colonial > period of some 45,000 square kilometers. I wasn’t sure how they would > understand that, so I told them that this was essentially the northern third > of North Carolina. Still, I was wondering later on if giving them the > measurement in hectares would have been better.
