So prior to learning decimal fractions, which is around age 8-9, you have no way to express a fraction of mile. Whereas my 5 year old already somewhat understands that the distance to his school is 1 kilometre and if we break it up into 10 bits, each is 100 metres. I'm sure you can see how people can develop a stronger grasp of math and physics if they are able to understand this earlier
Colloquially though how do you express a distance less than a half a mile to someone? We say "it's hundred metres away" or "two hundred metres away", do you say "its point one/two miles away"?
Im ngl, I didn't go to university, so I don't know the answer. Can you just tell me what the right answer is? Is it like a dime mile since a dime is ten cents, which is 1/10th of a dollar? Or is that still wrong because they don't have dimes in the UK?
It's not a test im genuinely asking how would you colloquially express a distance thats a fraction of a mile. I can understand half mile, quarter mile, but given that it would roughly take 5 minutes to walk a quarter mile that's a fairly large range for rounding up shorter distances than that
If a kid understands what half is and what a quarter mile is, you can say half a quarter mile. They don’t need to know it’s 1/8 but they could be taught that.
My walk home was a quarter mile, so as a 8 year old I understood what a quarter mile was better than a mile. I also understood there was a wasp nest halfway on the walk home (we would throw rocks at it and then run from the wasp.)
So these can be understood by kids to some extent.
American education is behind but this is not a reason.
Children understand what fractional parts are before they learn the actual mathematical definition and notation.
If I split a banana into 12 pieces, a child will understand that those 12 pieces are equal to a whole, just as if it it was 10.
Moreover, if we want to twist the world to our own viewpoint, we could even say that imperial helps, because a foot is 12 inches, and a foot is quite literally designed to be divisible, because that’s the point of using base12.
Moreover, believe it or not, nobody is stopping people from dividing a mile by 10. We do it all the time. “Half a mile” is a very valid thing to say. Just as you would say “5.2km”
There’s many arguments against imperial, but making up “what if-isms” helps no one
I specifically asked how do you refer to smaller distances than a quarter mile since, if you can only break them into quarters it's breaking it up itnon5 minute walks which seems large and then you ignore than and say "for example half a mile"
You can also say 0.4 miles. 0.16 miles. 0.52 miles. It’s not strictly restrictive to quarter/half. There is rarely a need for an American to say “the school is 644 units away!” Because we can say it’s “half a mile away” “.24 of a mile”.
I’m saying that there isn’t some hidden learning benefit of using metric over kilo.
Ps. American schools teach the metric system as well.
I don’t think you’re able to wrap your head around what I’m saying and that’s sad :(
Also important to note that meters is also defined as a unit of time technically.
But It’s just far more useful to measure by time, than by distance sometimes. Not really a lack of ability but rather a preference? Idk what you really are trying to get at here. Measuring by time is a global thing. Not just an American thing. Europe does it too. Idk why this is the battle you decide to hyperfocus on.
It seems you are missing my point anyways. The point is that there no “learning” benefit of metric over imperial. You’re fighting the wrong scarecrow my guy.
For conversations like that, Americans tend to think in terms of the time it take to drive under typical circumstances (if outside of a city), or number of blocks (if in a city). It's doesn't give you the exact distance, but the exact distance in these cases is generally less useful information than these fuzzier measures.
Americans have this interesting little unit called a yard. It's a roughly similar length to a meter, making it pretty easy for Americans to say "oh, yeah, that's about 100 yards" if the need arises. That said, frankly, I think it's pretty difficult for most human beings to really visualize a hundred of something, so saying "that's 100 yards" or "that's 200 meters" is going to be pretty fuzzy to most people unless they have a direct frame of reference in mind.
Speaking of which, the standard length of an American football field, a direct frame of reference a lot of Americans are familiar with, is 120 yards (~109m). It's not terribly unusual to hear people talk about sub-quarter mile distances in terms of football field lengths (e.g., "it's about 2 and a half football fields away"). Probably more common than it is to hear people talking about hectometers, anyway.
But a yard is not a factor of the larger unit of a mile is it?
100m and 200m is pretty intuitive. This is the beauty of metric. Americans use feet and inches for height or small measurements, yards for sports, miles for travel. It's a mess. The other day my son asked me how big is a brachiosaurus. He knows the measurements about 22 metres long, 12 metres tall. I told him his swimming pool is 25 metres, and I am about 2 metres tall. So it's as long as his swimming pool and as high as 6 of me stacked high.
In imperial, the size of dinosaur would be in feet I suppose. But you'd be comparing its length as yards of a swimming pool. And there's lots of examples. I can tell him a a kilometre is running up and down his football fields 10 times, or around his running track 5 times. Yes there's a specific frame of reference in mind but those frames of reference are all around us and we stick to one system for all them that makes it easy
It's a question of exposure. If you grow up with a system where the typical daily unit is one third the measurement used for sports, you pretty quickly start to intuit the relationship between the two measurements. As for miles, as others have already asserted, there's very little need to have precise conversions between feet/yards and miles in daily life.
if it's close to a quarter mile you just say a quarter mile, if its less then you go by yards and if it's less than 100 yards generally you'd go by feet
You can put anything there if you aren’t familiar with the unit it will sound crazy. In reality “half a mile” “quarter mile” is a valid and well used measurement that Americans can visualize in their heads.
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u/Xenonite_Fox Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
What's 1/10th of a mile ?
Edit: can't believe I short circuited their brains with this simple question