is ancient ways of measurement still in use today?
Answers
Explanation:
We measure more different things these days, for which a different basis of measurement is useful.
Ancient units weren’t developed on a consistent basis. Consider some measurements of weight: ~437 grains in an ounce, sixteen ounces to a pound, 2200 pounds in a ton. And that’s ignoring variant units like long vs. short tons or troy vs. avoirdupois weights. Or with measurements: twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard, 1760 yards to the mile. If you’re scaling up and down, that gets very complicated very quickly as you switch between units. With something like metric, it’s just powers of ten, on which our number system is based. That makes it a very natural fit for doing any mathematical operation you care to which jumps between boundaries of the system. You do your math in whatever unit you like and then move the decimal place as it becomes convenient. Did a calculation in, say, grams which gets very large? Just move the decimal over two places and you’ve got your answer in kilograms. That’s very useful for scientists, engineers, and people in industries which involve buying, shipping, or using large quantities which are then subdivided into smaller ones or vice versa.
This is not to say that metric is perfect. One of the advantages of many older methods of measurement is that they don’t use base ten. Many historical measurements are based on a couple of different factors. For example, there are a lot of twos, threes, and fours kicking around. That makes it great for things which are measured on a human scale. For example, if I’m cooking something and need to modify it for a different number of people, I almost never have to scale up by 10x or down to 0.1x. I need to be able to divide or increase evenly by halves, thirds, or quarters. The same is true if I want to scale a physical object, like modifying the size of a garden plot or some bit of carpentry I’m working on. These are cases where something like twelve inches to the foot is downright brilliant. It’s easy to divide that by two, three, four, or six.
So, then, modern—which is to say metric—units are preferred because they’re useful for many modern purposes.
Ancient units weren’t developed on a consistent basis. Consider some measurements of weight: ~437 grains in an ounce, sixteen ounces to a pound, 2200 pounds in a ton. And that’s ignoring variant units like long vs. short tons or troy vs. avoirdupois weights. Or with measurements: twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard, 1760 yards to the mile. If you’re scaling up and down, that gets very complicated very quickly as you switch between units. With something like metric, it’s just powers of ten, on which our number system is based. That makes it a very natural fit for doing any mathematical operation you care to which jumps between boundaries of the system. You do your math in whatever unit you like and then move the decimal place as it becomes convenient. Did a calculation in, say, grams which gets very large? Just move the decimal over two places and you’ve got your answer in kilograms. That’s very useful for scientists, engineers, and people in industries which involve buying, shipping, or using large quantities which are then subdivided into smaller ones or vice versa.
This is not to say that metric is perfect. One of the advantages of many older methods of measurement is that they don’t use base ten. Many historical measurements are based on a couple of different factors. For example, there are a lot of twos, threes, and fours kicking around. That makes it great for things which are measured on a human scale. For example, if I’m cooking something and need to modify it for a different number of people, I almost never have to scale up by 10x or down to 0.1x. I need to be able to divide or increase evenly by halves, thirds, or quarters. The same is true if I want to scale a physical object, like modifying the size of a garden plot or some bit of carpentry I’m working on. These are cases where something like twelve inches to the foot is downright brilliant. It’s easy to divide that by two, three, four, or six.
So, then, modern—which is to say metric—units are preferred because they’re useful for many modern purposes.
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