Our regular guest blogger, Joanne Arcand, helps us unravel the confusion over the metric system.
By Joanne Arcand
The other week, I was talking to a traffic officer who works near Niagara Falls, Ontario. He remarked that the stretch of highway immediately after the border crossing from the USA into Canada is a surefire way to catch up on his quota for speeding tickets for the month.
It seems the lovely folks from the USA read our speed limit sign (100) too quickly and try to go 100 miles per hour (the unit of speed south of the border). For a few minutes, it must feel like they’ve hit the autobahn of North American highways (no wonder we Canadians are so happy, we spend less time driving!). Then, the reality. Our speed limit in the “Great, White North” is in kilometers per hour. By traveling at 100 miles per hour, the drivers are actually moving at 160 kilometers per hour. If caught, the ticket is $600 and 6 demerit points on their license. That good ol’ metric system, eh?
Having grown up in the metric system, it makes sense to me to have a measuring system that uses ten subunits for every measurement. I always have to look up the conversion between pounds and tons, but I know that there are 1000 kilograms in a tonne.
As with many things, the conversion to metric in Canada began with the price of gasoline. It seems the US measure of the gallon (3.78 liters) differed from the imperial gallon used in Canada (4.55 liters). People filling up in the US were getting confused when they suddenly needed more gallons to fill their tank. So the Prime Minister at the time (a guy named Pierre Trudeau who was as close to a rock star that a politician can get at the time) decided to adopt the base ten measuring system used in France at the time.
As crazy as it seems, we Canadians still use imperial measures for our heights (if someone asks me, I’m 5’2” even though my license says 1.57 meters) and recipes (even Canadian recipes ask for 2 cups of flour, not 783 cubic centimeters). Maybe we’re too polite to bring the metric police down on everything, or maybe it’s a tribute to our imperial system pre-1970’s. There used to be a governmental department in charge of making us use metric, but it was dismantled in the 1980’s. Regardless, we still buy wood in feet/inches and order pints of beer so the transition hasn’t fully taken effect. Much like our two official languages, we seem to have two almost-official measuring systems.
The bonus is that the prefixes mean the same whether you are talking mass, length, or volume. The base unit changes and then we just add ‘milli’, ‘centi’, ‘kilo’, and so on.
Measuring in Canada: the estimation guide
1. Lengths
Lengths are measured in meters. A meters is “the length of the path light takes in 1/299 792 458 of a second”. For the sake of those of us that aren’t physicists:
A meter is about the height of a doorknob (the standard doorknob height is 40 inches and a meter is 39 inches).
The meter is broken down into 100 centimeters which are about the diameter of an M&M (Smarties are 1.5 centimeters).
A centimeter is broken down into 10 millimeters which are about the thickness of a dime.
On the other side, 1000 meters is a kilometer. It takes the average person 12 minutes to walk one kilometer. For football fans, it’s about ten lengths (endzone to endzone) of an NFL field. There are 2.2 kilometers in every mile, so a kilometer is about three Empire State buildings (or two CNTowers).
2. Volumes
Volumes are measured in Liters. A liter( or litre in Canada) is the volume of 1000 cubic centimeters of water at the temperature of melting ice. A die used in games such as monopoly are roughly 2 centimeters in each dimension. If you made a box of dice five dice long in each dimension, you would have a visual representation of a liter. Since we don’t walk around with that many dice in our pocket, here are some more equivalents:
A liter is about 2 pints of your chosen beverage, or about 2 and a third cans of soft drink.
If you think that seems an odd unit of measure, I will remind you that an ounce is 1/160 of a gallon (not to mention that a gallon is a different amount in liquid or dry measurement).
There is technically a centiliter (just like there’s a centimeter), or 1/100 of a liter. No one uses it, though.
A milliliter is 1/1000 of a liter or one cubic centimeter. It’s about the volume of a Smartie (which is listed as 1.27 cubic centimeters). Eye droppers and raindrops are usually about 1/2 a milliliter in volume.
3. Mass
Mass, or the amount of stuff something has, is also measured as compared to water. A gram, the metric unit of mass, is the mass of 1 cubic centimeter of water at the temperature that ice melts. Again, not the most handy reference because we don’t carry balance beams anymore (though I hear there’s an app for that!)
A gram is the mass of two standard paper clips. A USA dime is about 2 grams and a nickel is 5 grams or so.
Much like with volume, there is a centigram but we don’t use it. A milligram is 1/1000 of a gram. If you want to picture it, think of the mass of a grain of sand. It makes the current recommended daily allowance of 2300 mg of salt seem like a mountain of salination, doesn’t it?
The other units we use in mass are the kilogram, which is the mass of a liter of water or 1000 grams, and the tonne (with an extra ‘ne’ when compared to the USA ‘ton’). A tonne is 1000 kilograms and about the mass of a 2000 Corolla (a Prius is 1.5 tonnes).
Joanne Arcand is trying to juggle her role as a math teacher with her other life as mom of twin boys. She lives in Oakville, Ontario.
