Will We Ever Be
Ready For Metric?
or Just How Far is a
Country Mile?
Anyone who grew up listening to “Baseball Game of the Week” with Dizzy Dean doing the color commentary is very familiar with the phrase “He hit that ball a country mile!” But, to be brutally honest, a country mile is not a centimeter longer than any other mile. Maybe it just seems longer because the pace is usually more relaxed in the country. Whatever the reason, “a country mile” has became part of the vernacular, and is just one example of many phrases that would be incompatible with a metric system. In spite of some concerted efforts by the scientific community to convert the United States to a totally metric system, almost no “progress” has been made in that regard. Real estate is one of the major reasons for this lack of evolvement. The terms “acre, acre foot, front foot, square footage, section of land,” and so forth are so prevalent and firmly entrenched in the real estate sector that totally abandoning them for a metric system would be a task of major proportions.
Here are just a few conversion figures:
1 acre= 43,560 square feet— 4,046.825 square meters —
0.0015625 square mile
1 square mile= 640 acres — 27,878,400 square feet —
2.589988 square kilometers
1 square meter= 10.76391 square feet — 0.0001 hectare —
0.000241044 acre
1 acre= 43,560 square feet— 4,046.825 square meters —
0.0015625 square mile
1 square mile= 640 acres — 27,878,400 square feet —
2.589988 square kilometers
1 square meter= 10.76391 square feet — 0.0001 hectare —
0.000241044 acre
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