BrE or AmE in your country??

Pounds (for weight), pints and yards also remain in official British use, but note the following:

1. A British pint is larger than an American pint, and only used in the context of alcohol these days.
2. Brits like to express their weight in stone (14 pounds) and pounds, not pounds alone.
3. Short distances are given in yards on road signs, but practically everyone knows how long a foot is.

In short, the metric and imperial systems coexist in the UK and context dictates whether you should use one or the other.

A similar phenomenon exists in Hong Kong where:
1. Distances and lengths are always given in metric units but everyone knows inches and feet too (though not yards and miles),
2. The area of a property is usually given in square feet,
3. Celsius and Fahrenheit are both used to give BODY temperature, but only Celsius is used for air temperature,
4. Both pounds and kilograms are used for body weight, even in a medical context,
5. Traditional Chinese weights and measures are used in the street market.

The take-home message is: never assume that metrification implies ignorance of traditional weights and measures, for multiple systems of measurement can co-exist harmoniously ;-)

Jasper, Have you been hanging out in Alaska or in some of our Wilderness Parks? I can't imagine where you have been in the U.S. where you would have traveled for hundreds of kilometers or miles without seeing a house in the U.S. unless you were in someplace that had no roads like parts of the wilderness reserves, which are deliberately kept unpopulated due to a desire to keep them as pristine as posible. The only way you can get around in these areas is on foot or by horse. But these are not common, even the large National Parks have roads and houses (for rangers and other employees) more than every few hundred kilometers. It is counter intuitive to say that there are such places in the U.S. outside the wilderness. I wish it were not true, but how else would you fill up your car with fuel? You have to have gas stations, you have to have attendants for those stations, and you have to have a house or some other domicile for the attendants (and they aren't living in caves). I am afraid your contention is unfounded in most instances. Like I said, the only locations that fit your description are special land reserves in the Western U.S. Both the east and west coast are heavily populated, and the vast area in between is settled and has large cities like Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, Phoenix, Salt lake, Kansas City, Omaha, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Minneapolis. Each of which has a metropolitan area, including suburbs etc., over or around 1 million. The smallest of these, I believe (since I haven't been to all of them and I'm not going to look it up now), would be Omaha or Salt Lake. In NC, where I live, you can't get away from people unless you go up into the mountains, and then you always have to share your trails and campsites with others. My wife and I go to Colorado for skiing and camping sometimes, and it is even getting too crowded for us. It is true that Europe is more densely populated that the U.S., but it is not to the extent you are indicating.



There is a wonderful insight in the novel "The Age Of Innocence" which describes how Europeans come to the United States and partake of our hospitality, are cordial and kind while here, then go back to Europe and repeat the same slanders about us that they came with. Apparently, not much has changed in the last century.

Clan said,"Like I said, the only locations that fit your description are special land reserves in the Western U.S."

Clan, I live in Reno, NV, and have ridden all over the West. There really are many places in the west where my contention holds.

If you want a real adventure, drive from Reno to Las Vegas sometime. It gets a little bit scary to see hours pass without passing a single car. (Gawd, what would happen if your car stalled? If you're in rural Nevada, you could perish—no joke.)

I have driven that road two or three times as an alternative from my usual route from Las Vegas to San Francisco. There was not one occasion when I drove it without seeing another car or a house for hundreds of kilometers. Just taking a brief glance at a map, I find ten towns along that route, not one of them more than 100 miles from the next (this does not include towns that are just a few miles off the beaten path). Perhaps there were fewer vehicles than you were used to, perhaps the area was less populated than you are used to, but saying there was none is more than a simple exaggeration.

Also, not that I mind much, but the name is CIAN not CLAN.

Oh, give poor Jasper a rest. He might have exaggerated a bit, but we all know what he means. The countryside in England and Eastern China is dotted with little villages every few miles and mostly divided into agricultural plots. Not so in much of the US (or the Scottish Highlands, for that matter).

<<If you want a real adventure, drive from Reno to Las Vegas sometime>>

Jasper, I take it from earlier posts that you are not a Native to The U.S. I think there may be a cultural difference here between what an American calls an adventure and what a European calls an adventure. Driving down a well paved road for 450 miles is not what we would generally call an adventure. You have your car checked before hand, you have your cell phone, and you are pretty well taken care of. We grew up hearing stories that were far more hair razing than you might have.

Here is a brief historical account of a very famous American pioneer group:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eehxV6AHuzY&feature=related


And here is a film about a young American trying to escape civilization. The biography is also very interesting and has the same title as the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LAuzT_x8Ek

Or you can consider some of our sporting events:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47IHF9YMVo8&feature=related

Cian said,"Jasper, I take it from earlier posts that you are not a Native to The U.S."

LOL! I love it! I have never been mistaken for a non-native before.

Well, Cian, to answer your question, the one time I took that drive was admittedly in the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps it was no surprise that I saw very few cars. I remember feeling a growing concern over the lack of cars of houses.

I grew up in Tennessee (which might as WELL be a foreign country), where you can't go more than a dozen miles without finding some kind of little town, so to my perspective, the West is EMPTY.

Maybe the Reno to Las Vegas example was a poor one. It might be better to go out into real rural Nevada, say, from Elko to Jarbidge, or from Winnemucca to Gerlach. Rural Nevada is EMPTY. I remember a few years back a couple nearly perished by taking a rural route from Reno to Susanville, CA. They got stuck in the snow, dozens and dozens of miles from a single human being, in the dead of the winter. (They don't snowplow those remote roads for weeks). Their survival story was on the front page of the paper.

The "100s of kilometers" post was admittedly somewhat of an exaggeration--but not much. Please remember that we must put this in perspective: compared to Europe, in which one town often melds into another, the West is EMPTY. This is why one-story ranches (bungalows in the UK) are reasonable in the US, but both silly and irresponsible in overcrowded England—as our correspondent Damian has correctly noted.

I still think that Europeans (and some Americans) would be greatly astonished if they were to take such a drive.

By the way, Cian, according to people I know who've recently been through rural Nevada, there is no cell phone service way out there in the desert. ;)

<<You have your car checked before hand, you have your cell phone, and you are pretty well taken care of. >>

When you get away from big cities, your cell phone will probably not work. This happens even in upstate NY (in the Catskills), which is densly populated compared to the US West. For example, in much of the Delaware valley from Margaretville up through Roxbury, there's zero bars of signal on the Verizon Network (last fall, anyway).

<<I think there may be a cultural difference here between what an American calls an adventure and what a European calls an adventure...We grew up hearing stories that were far more hair razing than you might have. >>

It would be a fallacy to lump all Americans into one group and all Europeans into another. I lived in San Francisco for two years and in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a year... my classmates in those cities were every bit as sheltered and attached to urban life as I was (and still am). On the other hand, I've got European friends who went trekking across Ukraine and hitchhiking all the way to Mongolia.

<<...how Europeans come to the United States and partake of our hospitality, are cordial and kind while here, then go back to Europe and repeat the same slanders about us that they came with. Apparently, not much has changed in the last century.>>

Hahahaha. I liked San Francisco and Boston. Whenever I hear people slandering the United States, I put in a good word for the West Coast and the Northeast. I do poke fun at the stereotypically Republican-voting, gun-toting, culturally insular Deep South, but so do my San Franciscan and Bostonian friends ;-)

Semicatskillian: "When you get away from big cities, your cell phone will probably not work. This happens even in upstate NY (in the Catskills), which is densly populated compared to the US West. For example, in much of the Delaware valley from Margaretville up through Roxbury, there's zero bars of signal on the Verizon Network (last fall, anyway)."

That's right.

I don't think Cian has been in real rural Nevada, either; he stuck to the main roads.

I have been on those rural roads, and indeed it's true that you can travel many, many miles without seeing either house or car. In fact, on certain routes, survival gear is recommended. I have read that Arizona and New Mexico is also full of these incredibly remote areas.

But this is all beside the point, which is: America's vastly less densely populated, so a one-story ranch makes better sense here than in England.

I've driven all over the US, and I've been through areas where you'd see a house only very rarely (Wyoming or Alaska probably the biggest culprits), but I wouldn't say hundreds of miles along a road.

I've been in elevators using all sorts of numbering systems here in the US. I see no standard being followed. Some are B-G-1-2-etc, some are B-1-2 or B-G-2. If there is more than one level of basement, it will sometimes be referred to as B1 and B2, or LL1 and LL2 (lower level). Since a lot of buildings have exits on multiple levels, a star is almost always placed by the floor button with the most-used exit.

<<I've driven all over the US, and I've been through areas where you'd see a house only very rarely (Wyoming or Alaska probably the biggest culprits), but I wouldn't say hundreds of miles along a road.>>

Same here. Sometimes you see signs like "Next gas 85 miles", but I've never been anywhere in the US where you have to drive for 300 or so miles between gas stations. Maybe that's the case up in Canada or Alaska, though.

However, I suspect I've been in areas where you'd have to drive 100's of miles to find the nearest elevator buttons.

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One thing that should be pointed out is that the US is by no means a monolithic entity socially or culturally, and one should not expect all people from the US to have the same experiences with such things at all. For instance, for me at all, I rarely leave Wisconsin, and even more rarely leave Wisconsin and northern Illinois together; I have not even *been* in Nevada, or for that matter any of the West per se (aside from flying over or, in one case, going through by train) in the first place myself. To me, Nevada might as well be a foreign country; of course, then, that applies to most of the US in practice as well.