why does a few countries like the US use a different unit of measurement for size/distance than the rest of the world?
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It used to be that every place in the world had their own units that were different from ever where else.
In medieval Europe that went to the point where sometimes each city had their own system of measurements and they all had the same or similar names.
Anytime some government managed to take control over a large enough region they tried to standardize things (for tax purposes if nothing else), but often rather than one single standard this just added one more system everyone was using.
You see remnants of this in the way things like gold are weighed in different ounces and pounds than other things and how there are “liquid” and “dry” version some units and how there are different types of miles for going over land or water.
As you can imagine this did not make trade easy when there were many many more of these things.
When the enlightenment happened and people got into fads such as science and overthrowing old systems, they cam up with a new system.
It would be defined “scientifically” and the conversion between different units would be based on a simple common system using powers of 10.
This got adopted throughout Europe and much of the world thanks to European imperialism and became the standard the entire world uses.
The US was supposed to adopt it too, but pirates stole the examples. It was attempted to introduce the metric system several times since then with mixed success.
The US kept using a system based on the old British one that sues many of the same names, but in part has entirely different values. (a pint in the US is different from an imperial pint).
Today US units are legally defined by us law in terms of metric units.
As for the other countries that also still use the old system.
The UK and Canada use parts of the old system in everyday life and SI units for everything else. Liberia didn’t adopt the metric system because it was founded as a weird sort of colony of the US, some pacific islands that are technically independent countries but practically function as pseudo Us territories us the US system. And then there is Myanmar which is just weird in many ways.
So basically it is really just the US that is left with the old system.
And they use metric units too in many areas of life especially scientific ones.
Also new units that describe electrical phenomena and such are all metric.
A Volt for example is technically just a short way of saying: one Kilogram times one square meter divided by one second cubed and one Ampere.
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