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Should America Convert

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Should America Convert

Dear Mr. President,
My name is Colin Ward. All Americans know is the customary system of measurement. That is all people know and they wouldn’t be happy if you just went and changed it on them. I believe that the U.S. should keep our customary system of measurement.
For one, it would be a major culture shock to the US and I don’t think everyone would take the change so smoothly. If we changed to the metric system, virtually every aspect of our daily lives would change. For example, measuring things for cooking would change; students in school would use different measurements for math and science class, gas would be sold in ounces, food produce would be sold by an ounce, we would say temperature in Celsius, and …show more content…
Imagine changing every street sign in America that corresponds with miles per hour or how many miles away a place is, to metric friendly signs, which would also be very expensive. It would simply be way too expensive to afford these changes with how much America is already in debt and would send America into an economic crisis. Other things that would be subject to change are measurement tools such as rulers, cooking measuring cups, a tape measure, and much more things that we use daily. If America made this change company’s would have to produce brand new measuring tools like these and people would have to go buy such tools that they might already have a lot of. Company’s such as NASA claims that converting its measurements systems and technology would cost them over 370 million dollars because NASA and people overseas were not using the same unit of measurement. America’s economy and Americas company’s/businesses would have a very tough time converting to the metric system.
Even though the US is only one of three countries in the world that haven’t adopted the metric system but the US already tried to go metric. In 1975 the federal government adopted the metric system as the preferred system of measurement in America. The change was ineffective because many people were not a fan of the change and because they were already adapted to the lifestyle with it. This just shows that people over the years prefer using our current measurement system rather than changing it and pretty much staring over learning a new measurement

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