Shark Tank
Published on Nov 19, 2015
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PRESENTATION OUTLINE
SHOULD THE U.S. CONVERT TO METRIC?
Of the 196 countries on the Earth, only 3 don't use the metric system, including the United States. There's probably a reason. If America converted to the metric system, things would be much easier.
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Why switch?
Things would be much easier. Why? Because everything in the metric system is based on 10 for everything, instead of 12s, 8s, 2s, 4s, 3s, and even 212 and 5280 that the U.S. Customary uses. Instead, metric would have 1, 10, 100, 1000, and so on.
So what do most Americans think? On debate.org, a survey website, 71% want the switch and only 29% don't. 98.47% of countries use the metric system, and so do scientists.
You can't expect to simply change every traffic sign, speedometer, food label, and thermometer and have every American know the difference. The process of changing would need to be gradual. We would have the metric and customary on the same signs so we could get used to it.
Photo by phlyingpenguin
Overall, it would cost a decent amount of money to change the labels. It would cost about $2 billion to change 25 million traffic signs. But, even though a lot of money, that would also be the main cost. Unless, of course, every car owned in America had their speedometers replaced. That would cost a whopping $12.4 billion, from 62 million cars and $200 for each new speedometer. So, if we converted, we would probably only change newly manufactured cars' speedometers.
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