Ah well, Lydart, in honour of your mother how many of us 'older' persons still think in terms of yards, feet and inches instead of metres and centimetres!
When the news refers to a criminal the police are looking for, I still find it hard to translate the cms into my idea of height! 5foot6, 6foot, 6foot6, etc are still really and immediately meaningful to me whereas their metric equivalents don't quickly give me an idea of the height of (say) an escapee.
This comes in useful if one has (rats - I don't!) a convict ancestor who is described thus.
Not to mention, of course, Wills are often in Lsd.
Here in Australia we use kilometres for motoring speed and distance. But many countries don't - so I'm glad I can still think in terms of mph and miles travelled
As for Gadget's example, I'd be really pleased were any of my grandchildren able to exercise the arithmetical agility to do that division. Hang on - perhaps I should try it on my children first. Though no doubt my two computer boffin sons would ask the conversion rate and quickly work out a formula - my daughter (no computer boffin) would do it from scratch and, I think, get it right. But none of them as quickly as we would have done
JAP
PS: meles, I can't believe that South Africa (1975!) was so far behind Australia (1956!).
One thing I do know about TV in the UK is that rells of my closest old school friend went to their rells in London and were quickly greeted and then made to stay silent for some hours while the other rells watched the Coronation in 1953.
This would be relatively unremarkable except for the fact that the two sets of rells had left Nazi Germany (yes, they had Jewish forebears) in early 1939 - one set for the UK and one set for South America - and this was the very first time they had seen each other since Germany!!
