Time to fully embrace the metric system

I REFER to the letter writer (October 12) who says his daughter’s school bag weighs under two stone.

It is time the writer got to grips with the metric system.

While his daughter is being taught metric in school, he reverts to the imperial system when describing her heavy burden.

The dual metric-imperial system has widespread anomalies. Ireland began metric conversion in the ’70s but never moved to full conversion with exemptions granted for the pint and the proposed new three-quarter pint measure.

Land prices are quoted in euro per acre, but livestock are priced in euro per kilograms. Traffic reports reveal tailbacks of miles, but roads are signposted in kilometres. Gardaí looking for a suspect give their description in pounds, feet and inches. A vehicles performance is measured in miles per gallon, yet petrol is sold in litres. Parents give the weight of their new arrivals in pounds and ounces yet their medical records are in kilograms. In the 1998 Mars Orbiter crash, costing $94 million, programmers input data in inches instead of millimetres. Sliced meat is sold in kilograms, yet shoppers ask for it in pounds.

Safefood devised a TV ad advising people to take note of their weight and if it exceeds 32 inches for a woman or 36 inches for a man, action should be taken. Creating an advertisement that implies men and women are unable to take their dimensions using a metric tape-measure is unsettling given that schools educate us in the metric system. Yet Safefood advises us on weight reduction using the imperial system. As metric is leading in the final furlong, it should be adopted at all levels in terms of ease of use over imperial units.

Gerry Coughlan

Parkhill West

Kilnamanagh

Dublin 24