The Metric System By Bernardo Definition Metric System

The Metric System By: Bernardo

Definition Metric System - The decimal measuring system based on the meter, liter, and gram as units of length, capacity, and weight or mass.

Introduction Unit conversion affects many areas in our daily life. Converting units is used in mathematics, science, cars, planes and many other things. This is important because each country has a unique way of measuring their substances and a conversion is required to understand the exact quantity needed. In the past there has been accidents due to failure of converting units properly, causing accidents.

The only way people could communicate quantities or units in the past was by either using a telegraph, postal mail, birds or messengers. These methods are all good but the problem is it takes time to send and receive these messages. If you had a problem with the plane and had to settle for an emergency landing, the destination airport would take long to receive the message, therefore the plane had to land with no help and instructions. Another problem would be: An airplane is coming from a very far country and they land on your airport. The crew from your airport does not know what units the other country use to fill the oil tank in the plane and therefore the people in the plane have to wait for a long time until the message is sent back with the correct units.

Scientific Solutions Dimensional analysis is a mathematical system which uses conversion factors to move from unit of measurement to another unit of measurement. An example is if you want to calculate how many seconds there are in a day you can use dimensional analysis to get your answer.

Metric system is basically a system used for measuring and for everyone to understand. It is a system of measurement in a decimal form. The metric system solves the unit problem by using a method called “cancellation”. When you have two of the same units you cancel them out and move on to a new unit (like the example in the previous slide). After all that you just multiply the numerators and the denominators.

How successful are we in implementing the metric system around the world and how does it affect society/culture and the economy? Unit misunderstandings can occur in a lot of different ways in life. For example: Let’s say someone suffers from diabetes. They go to buy Humulin R U-500 which is the name of the insulin the person needs to take for their diabetes. This insulin has 500 units of insulin in each milliliter and is 5 times more concentrated than Humulin R U-100. The person should be taking R U-100 but is taking the insulin which is 5 times more concentrated. This was an error made by the scientist of the bottle and the quantity was not right. After taking the insulin, the over-dose caused a reaction and the person died. There was an error in the metric calculation which caused a loss of $125 million Mars orbiter. The Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement and the agency’s team used the metric system for the operation.

Conclusion The metric system is very important nowadays and influences many areas in our lives. Medicine, technology, aircraft and many others are all affected by this. I have understood how important the metric system is by looking at examples such as how NASA lost a lot of money by losing an aircraft due to unit misunderstandings and how people can die from taking the wrong amount of medicine. The solution to solve these problems is to have every country learn the metric system so accidents are prevented. All countries could be taught how to do this. If a country disagrees to this, they must inform the country they are working with that they don’t use the metric system and use another system.

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