Not necessarily miles, but note those imperial units sometimes come in different ways, for example:
- When folks in India ask my height, they seem to understand better if I say in feet and inches than centimeters...
- Look at someone selling land in Canada, and acres seems to be common in addition to hectares
- Air traffic control in Europe seems to assign altitudes in feet, not meters (e.g. MH17 was flying at the 33,000 foot level)
Correspondingly in the US you might buy a two liter bottle of soft drink and a half gallon of milk....
And I confuse everyone over here ...
Australia is very metric, right down to having kj (kilojoules, I think) as their calorie measurement on food packages. I've figured out I need to divide that number by 4 to get an approximate calorie content.
As a Canadian who went through the change to metric in about 1976, I think in metric for most things ... except height and smaller measurements (like the length of my desk, the width of a small bedroom, etc.). I'm with India there. For those measurement, I think in feet and inches.
So over here in Australia, I'll say something like, "The desk is 5 feet long" ... and I'll get a whole lot of blank stares. I might as well have just spoken in Spanish or something.
Of course the same thing happens when I ask the office administrator for a "binder" to put some documents in, or tell my co-workers that they can help themselves to the "candies" in the bowl on my shelf, or mention to the infrastructure department that the "sidewalk" on my way to work has developed a significant crack. Lots of blank stares until I figure out the correct terms for those words.
