Just goes to show that even people who use feet and inches have no idea how many inches in a foot. This goes well with the US students measuring on a ruler and assuming the 8th’s are decimals of an inch.
To repeat an anecdote posted here some years ago, I ran a lab -- the first one for an Introductory Physics course -- in which students had to measure blocks of wood and assign uncertainties to those values as a first step in the exercise.
One group came up with a length of 4.13 cm and I could easily see that the block was much larger than that. I asked them how they came up with that figure. Sure enough, a student picked up a cheap, dual-scale, plastic ruler which was the assigned lab equipment. He put the inch scale along the block, noted the "4" tick mark, then counted the small ones past that "4" mark until he came to the end of the block. Yep. There were 13 of those tick marks! An interesting discussion followed.
Jim On 2015-02-08 15:47, Michael Payne wrote:
Just been watching a program on a UK channel 5 star, about a “bedroom tax”. This was the first time I’d heard of this tax. The guy paying the tax had to measure his room after reading in a British tabloid that any room less than 71 ft2 was not subject to this tax. So he got out his measuring tape (in feet) and proceeded to measure and came up with 7 feet 15 inches! Just goes to show that even people who use feet and inches have no idea how many inches in a foot. This goes well with the US students measuring on a ruler and assuming the 8th’s are decimals of an inch. A kid counts 5 inches and 4 eighths and comes up with 5.4 inches. Another reason to change to metric. Mike Payne
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