As I guess you did also, I grew up with both. Metric was taught in school, Imperial was what my family used. Metric is clearly better in many ways, not least as soon as you start converting between length / mass / volume. But the one area Imperial wins is division. You can cleanly divide 10 by just 5 and 2, whereas 12 (inches in a foot) has factors of 6, 4, 3, 2...
A third of a yard is a foot. A third of a foot is 4 inches. A third of a metre is 333.3recurring mm.
We were very well on our way to go metric before the idea was tossed out. It was back in the 1970s when I was in grade school and we were being prepared for the eminent switchover to the metric system. The tens times tables were super critical to know, we were told. (Somehow, I also mix it up with the terrifying impending doom of the eventual nuclear war with USSR. Another important piece of school curriculum we were taught. I also may have thought that if I learned the metric system we would win the Cold War.) Yet, before the biggest war of them all (the Cola wars), the soda companies were "all in" on the metric idea and prepared for it. And that, my friends, is why we have 2-liter bottles of soda on grocery shelves in the US of A.
As I guess you did also, I grew up with both. Metric was taught in school, Imperial was what my family used. Metric is clearly better in many ways, not least as soon as you start converting between length / mass / volume. But the one area Imperial wins is division. You can cleanly divide 10 by just 5 and 2, whereas 12 (inches in a foot) has factors of 6, 4, 3, 2...
A third of a yard is a foot. A third of a foot is 4 inches. A third of a metre is 333.3recurring mm.
We were very well on our way to go metric before the idea was tossed out. It was back in the 1970s when I was in grade school and we were being prepared for the eminent switchover to the metric system. The tens times tables were super critical to know, we were told. (Somehow, I also mix it up with the terrifying impending doom of the eventual nuclear war with USSR. Another important piece of school curriculum we were taught. I also may have thought that if I learned the metric system we would win the Cold War.) Yet, before the biggest war of them all (the Cola wars), the soda companies were "all in" on the metric idea and prepared for it. And that, my friends, is why we have 2-liter bottles of soda on grocery shelves in the US of A.