Whether it is twips for typographic screen measurements, hands for horses’ heights or furlongs for horse racing, many imperial units are used for specific purposes. By contrast, the International System of Units (SI), the modern version of the metric system, is based on the principle that each measurable phenomenon has one basic named unit and all the multiples and subdivisions of the unit then follow the same logical structure using prefixes.
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The link between muddled units and verbose traffic signs
Successive UK governments have retained imperial units exclusively for distance and speed on road traffic signs. Ronnie Cohen argues that, as a result, we have been unable to take advantage of universal unit symbols, a feature of the metric system but not of imperial.
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Metric Views 