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Metric System Research Paper

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How many 16ths of an inch are in a mile? How many fluid ounces in a cubic inch? What is the conversion factor between degrees celsius and degrees Fahrenheit? These are some of the terrible questions that plague only the minds of people in three countries in the world: the United States of America, Myanmar, and Liberia. All 193 of the other countries in the world use the metric system. The United States of America should convert to the metric system because of the following reasons: it is the global and scientific standard, it is much easier to use, not using it causes US consumers and businesses to lose money, and our lack of familiarity with it is part of the reason why our students lag so far behind much of the rest of the world in STEM …show more content…

One example of this occurred in 1999 when the NASA spacecraft Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere due to a conversion error. This was caused because one of the Lockheed Martin engineers tried to use the US customary (imperial) system while all the other engineers used the metric system (SI) This eventually caused the $125,000,000 orbiter to miss its proper orbit and burn up in the atmosphere of mars (NASA). Although losses due to conversion errors on this magnitude are rather uncommon, there are still other ways in which not using the metric system that can cause US consumers and business to lose money, When selling a product, the seller needs to have sufficient demand for their product in order to justify the cost of production. One way to increase the profit is to start mass producing the product. This is because mass producing can significantly reduce the cost per item to produce a product. However when there is insufficient demand for a product to mass produce the profit margin will substantially decrease, and the price of the item for consumers will need to be increased to maintain the cost of operations for the company making the product. This means that because the US uses a different measurement system than the rest of the world and has different sizes of products, that any business that makes things for our country has fewer potential buyers and a higher cost to make each item. This means that if that business converted to the metric system that they could potentially increase their sales by a factor of 31. Along with increasing business profits, changing to the metric system would lead to cheaper prices for all consumers because businesses would not need to have both metric and special US customary equipment —thus, lowering the operating costs of the

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