Amazon

Tuesday 28 September 2010

A challenge for my brain weighing approx 1,350 grammes.

I'm about to start my training for my new job on 11th October and it dawned on me that it may well be useful for me to gen up on the metric system. I believe that the metric system came into place in the change challenged British Isles in the mid 1970s. In fact it must have appeared the day after I left school (joke).


Since then I have existed in the comfortable world of pounds and ounces, feet and inches, yards and miles, pints and half pints. Like a lot of people  I don't recall ever needing to actually ask for a kilogramme of spuds, a litre of milk or a half kilo of sausages. The weights side of things metric will be the most needed in my work so I've searched the internet for a table of imperial and metric comparisons. Oh my goodness and quelle horreur! We seem to be dealing with decimal point blah de blah type figures. Examples: a pound = 0.4536kg and a gram = 0.035 oz.


note rather helpful imperial and metric boxes

500 grammes isn't that big.

 
Two pork chops are about £3 and weigh under half a kilo.
I have decided that the best way to learn is to haunt a few supermarkets and actually SEE what these weights equate to and learn that way and become used to thinking in metric. As you can see from the pictures above I've even taken to photographing the labels on food to educate myself. At home that is, not in the shops. Another little challenge for the brain of Phil.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You'll soon get the hang of it. Basically 2.2lbs = 1kg
39" = 1 metre

How's the clutter clearing and house hunting coming along?

Dean said...

My mind is stuck in imperial but I happily buy a litre of milk or a few hundred grams of things the trick is to just work with one or the other as you dont really need to know the equivilents off pat just a rough idea works well enough.
1/4lb = 100g ish especially if buying meat/veg it just needs to be more precise when following recipes...dont try to mix imperial/metric as the results are not often pretty lol.

Phil Lowe said...

GailsMan: Thankyou Christopher. Clutter clearing pretty much done and waiting until I start the job to look at house hunting. I might well meet someone who knows someone type of thing.

Dean: I think that you have some sound advice there. Rough ideas will suit me fine for now. Thankyou.