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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Any country can use any system it wants.
Obviously before Metric, a lot of people started building stuff using Imperial units. That meant factories and a lot of building supplies standardized on inches and feet. When the Metric System came out there were some bills in Congress to try and change to it, but the people who manufactured things complained about how much money it would cost and paid Congress to keep the Imperial system. Other countries decided in the long run it would be worth the pain and changed. (It didn’t hurt that many other major countries sustained *severe* damage during the world wars compared to the US, so were in a better position to rebuild manufacturing around Metric.)
Schools still teach the Metric system and especially science-based classes use it extensively. But practically all public measurements are still Imperial just because it’d cost a lot of billionaires some money to change (and the longer it goes on, the worse it gets) and it’d be a shame if they lost a little bit of money.
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