British measurements: pints, feet, Celsius, and more!

Hi. I'm Gill at www.engvid.com, and today's lesson is all about wonderful "British Measurements".

Okay? The way that we measure things like height, how high somebody is

(in my case, not very high); weight, how much people weigh

(and again, in my case, not very much); how

food and drink are weighed, like the volume, the quantity; property, like space in houses,

the space, the shape of a room, how big a room is; things like temperature, how hot

or cold it is in a room; and things like in farming, land, the amount of space that belongs

to a farm for agriculture or dairy farming, or whatever.

Okay, so there are all these different things that have to be measured. I'm sure you have

your own system in your country. You may use a similar system to us, but in the U.K., we

actually now have a mixture of two systems which makes it a little bit complicated. We

have an older system called the "imperial system", which is not based on 10. A lot of

things from our old systems were not based on units of 10 or 100 or 1,000, a little bit

like the old money that we used to have, which we're talking about in another lesson. So,

the imperial system, all sorts of strange numbers for different things; for height,

weight, etc.

And then, though, when we joined the European community, the European Union, as it's now

called, we became part of Europe, and because a lot of European countries, probably all

of them, were using the "metric system", we had to take on that system as well. Okay.

But it's very difficult to suddenly change from one system to another. So, what we have

now is a mixture of both. And for different categories of measurements, we either use

imperial or metric, or sometimes both together just to... So that you can choose which one

to look at.

Okay, so let's just start by looking at height. So, my height would be measured in feet and

inches. Okay? Now, I've got a tape measure, here. It's quite an old tape measure, and

it's marked on both sides. And these are inches, so where you can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, going

across, those are inches. Okay? And if I go up to 12... So, here we are, it's not a 10,

it's a 12, 12 inches are one foot. So we've got feet and inches. One foot and several

feet. So this tape measure, actually, it goes up to 60... It goes up to 60 inches. There's

59, there's 60. So 60 inches. Divide 60 by 12, that gives you 5. So this tape measure

is 5 feet. So you can see from that, I'm just over 5 feet. I'm actually 5 feet, 2 inches.

Okay? My height. So, that is how people generally, in the U.K., measure their height. So it's

not metres.

So, if you're talking to an English friend and you ask them: "How tall are you?" "Tall"

is a useful word. "How tall are you?" They will probably reply, if they are English or

British, they will probably reply in feet and inches; whereas you, perhaps, might know

your own height in metres. Okay? So, that's quite difficult. You can find websites on

the internet which do conversions, so it's very easy if you just Google: "convert feet-metres",

you can find a little calculator to do the conversions, so it's okay, it just takes a

bit of time. Right. So, feet and inches. So there are 12 inches in one foot. So, instead

of 10, the unit is 12. 12 inches in one foot, and then if you have 3 feet, 3 feet, which

is 36 inches, that's called a yard. That is one yard. And I think it's a little bit less

than one metre, just slightly less than one metre. So, 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in

a yard. 3 feet in a yard.

And then, anything bigger than a yard, we... When we go up to a mile, which is a lot, lot

longer than a yard, how many do we have? We have 1,760 yards in a mile. So, 1,760 yards

in a mile. So you can see all these numbers: 12, 3, 1,760, they're... There's no tens or

hundreds in there; it's all very, very strange mixtures of numbers. Okay? So that's the way

it is. Some people put both. If I put 5 foot 2, I might put in brackets 1.57 metres. Okay?

So, it's a random number; it's not a very equal number.

Okay, so moving on to weight. What... What things weigh, the heaviness of things. What

we use, again, in the U.K., we have the weight in stones and pounds. Okay? And there are

14 pounds in a stone. So, again, a random number. 14 pounds in a stone. So, we don't

use kilos, which are used mostly in the rest of Europe. Okay. Anything less than a pound,

there's a smaller measurement called an ounce, and there are 16 ounces in a pound. So there's

another different number. 16 ounces in a pound, 14 pounds in a stone.

And then if we go up to something much heavier, you may have heard the word "ton". So we talk

about a 10-ton lorry. Maybe that word "ton" is used in other languages as well, possibly

in America and Canada, I'm not sure. But a 10-ton lorry is a very heavy lorry. And we

also use tons as a kind of a metaphor: "We have tons of sugar in the cupboard. We don't

need to buy any more sugar. We've got tons of it." So it's used in a sort of metaphorical

sense to mean a lot of something. It's not literally weighing tons, but it's quite a

lot. Okay? So that's weight.

Moving on to food and drink, if you buy a pint of milk in the supermarket, it's called

a pint. A pint of milk. But on the label, it says: 1 pint/568 millilitres because the

litre is the liquid measurement in the metric system. So, when you buy food and drink, you

tend to have the label with both measurements on. Okay? But it's still a pint that you buy,

a pint of milk. You... Also, if you go into a pub or a bar, you buy a pint of beer or

half a pint of beer, so that's still the old measurement. Okay? There is a larger liquid

measurement as well from the imperial system called a gallon, and people used to buy their

petrol for their cars in gallons, but I think they now buy it in litres instead. So that...

That has changed.

Okay, so moving on to the measurement of space, such as property. When you're looking at property,

there's often a floor plan showing the shape of the room and measurements, the size. And

estate agents who are selling the property usually use both measurements, so they use

square metres from the metric system, and square feet from the imperial system, because

they want to be as helpful as possible because they're trying to make it easy for people

to buy and not get confused. Okay?

Similarly, with farming, people talk about a 40-acre farm. That's all the fields that

go with the farm, 40 acres. That's an old style of measurement.

And then, finally, for temperature, we tend to use centigrade now. So, we would say:

"This room... The temperature in this room, which I can tell from my little chart, here, is

21 degrees centigrade",

but we do sometimes also use the older system, Fahrenheit, and

you can see that is actually marked on this chart. There's centigrade on this side with

a heat-sensitive strip on it, and the Fahrenheit is just marked with numbers.

Okay.

And then also, this tape just has the old inches on, but this one, which is a more modern

tape has inches along the top, there. And if I turn it the other way... Oh no, I don't

have to turn it the other way, no. If... If you look along the bottom row, that has the

millimetres. Okay? So we've got the inches along the top and the millimetres along the

bottom just to show how both systems are being used on the same piece of tape.

Okay, so I hope that hasn't been too much of a shock for you to find all these strange,

strange numbers; 12s, and 14s, and 16s. It's just developed through the centuries, that's

why we just have no choice about it. So, anyway, I hope you found it interesting. And if you're

coming to the U.K. or if you're in the U.K., it might help you to understand

a little more easily how measurements are shown.

So, if you'd like to test yourself on this information, please go to the website: www.engvid.com

where there's a quiz waiting for you.

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And hope to see you again next time.

Okay. Bye for now.