How many feet in a mile: is this common knowledge

I used to ride my penny-farthing 2 leagues to school carrying 7 pecks of parsnips.

On a related note, who knows the official setup distance of the toeline from a dartboard? Without teh google....

 

are you high ?

How can dividing by ten be harder to understand than miles > yards > feet > inches > 16ths of inches ?

 

No I am not high...

It seems like people in America use the inch system or whatever its called than them metric system. A lot of my friends still prefer to use the American system instead of the metric system.

 

The fact the United States is stubborn and refuses to make things easy is besides the point.

 

I use feet and inches all day at work as a carpenter , but as a measurement system , metric is 100 times more logical

Not just for length , but weight , volume , etc , all work similarly in metric , all over the map in imperial

 

reminds me of this...

 

Some Americans may find it easier because it is what they are used to, and Americans don't like change, but metric is definately easier. I am an engineer so I work with units every day and it is a pain to do conversions from feet to miles and SF to SY etc. I learned metric in school and was used to that before I came to America, now, after 15 years I still struggle with these archaic American system.

 

Well, it is easier to add 3/16 to 1 3/8 in your head than say, 587mm and 1.342 cm.

 

lol I won't argue that more times than not there is no practical use for knowing it. Just happened to come up because I work for a natural gas company and this co-worker was working on a press release mentioning XX,XXX amount of feet of gas mains and she wanted to put it into miles since people could picture a distance in miles more than a shit load of feet haha.

 

Not really

 

You should not use "cm". That's the biggest mistake. I see my kids learn that in school. Use mm, m, km - 1000 increments. cm just confuses things.
587mm + 1342mm is easy. 3/16 + 1 3/8 is difficult.

 

uh , the ones on your truck are metric sized

 

Again, it is just because you are used to imperial.
If you learn metric as a child you are lightyears ahead on the easy and practical scale later on.

 

a real test of one's acuteness in this context (how many "feet" in a mile) would be to observe whether or not the person being asked the question looks down at their feet...

 

Both are easy

 

One mile = 6,076 feet. Nautical mile, that is. Rounded off to an even 6K for practical navigation purposes.

As to the original question, I would think (or hope anyway) that the statute mile is fairly common knowledge. Big difference between knuckleheads having the common knowledge of it, and the common sense to know how to use it tho.

 

I disagree with both of you, addition is quite easy regardless of whether you have to convert to a common unit or a common denominator.

 

Because those of us who know get sick of a) people asking us all the time and b) making fun of us for bothering to remember it in the first place. A close friend of mine is very guilty of that, but he's coming around. I'll DRUM the stuff into his brain matter!

Metric is easier, just mess with the decimal point. One of my math teachers always claimed that way back in the day to stop the 'foot' and 'inch' from changing distance every time a new king got crowned (king's foot size = new 'foot'), at some point it was tied to the SI/metric system that was popular in other parts of Europe, and thus 1 inch became EXACTLY 2.54 centimeters.

Other easy ones to remember that are handy all the time - a kilometer is about 0.62 miles, a kilogram is about 2.2 pounds, a gallon is about 3.786 litres, and when figuring engine displacement, a cubic inch is about 16.387 cubic centimetres (0.016387 litres - there's that decimal place fun). Or you could go exact and type 2.54^3 into the calculator.

Or another easy metric thing... one cubic centimeter of water at standard temperature and pressure is exactly one gram. That's the definition of a gram, so a liter (1000cc) of water at STP is exactly one kilogram.

Ahhh down the overgrown weedy roads of high school memory lane...

 

1 3/8 = 1 6/16

1 6/16 + 3/16 = 1 9/16

Since it is all in multiples of 2, fractional addition in the american system is stupid easy. Adding integers in the hundreds or thousands becomes unwieldy in short order unless you're rain man.

I'm not saying that there aren't advantages to the metric system - there are many - but fractional addition isn't one of them.

 

Denver has a magazine called 5280, you know the mile high thing.