Dissing the Metric System
Nearly every country in the world operates on the metric system, facilitating communication, trade and investment. So why is the United States one of the few holdouts for the imperial system? Actually, it isn’t. The U.S. technically adopted the metric system in 1875 and many times thereafter. All its weights and measures have been defined in metric standards since the late 1800s. The problem: the change has never been made mandatory, so the country continues on the imperial system. ABC News-Australia takes a deeper look at the quandary.
