Is the rest of the world jealous of Americans' mastery of fractions?
Maybe thats where all this animosity comes from. We can do precise machinery in thousands of an inch or cover great distances like a half mile.
You do realise all engineering and science in the world uses the metric system because it's more precise and practical for representing small numbers and conversion? Americans in those fields land up using metric regardless.
Metric is more practical representation and easier to do calculations/conversions with, which inevitably means precision is actually easier to represent in metric.
All machinery inputs are like this "cut to 0,23 mm" etc. Imperial system is impractical dealing with sizes such as millimetres, 1 mm is 0,0394 in, metric is easier to represent, especially in circuitry/computing concerning that sort of precision. The physical real world sizes are the same in the end.
You can't even represent nanometres in imperial.
1 kilometre = 1 000 metres, 100 000 centimetres, 1 000 000 millimetres.
What is 1/2 of 1 kilometre? 0,5 kilometres, which is 500 metres, or 50 000 centimetres, or 500 000 millimetres.
It is easy to know how many centimetres are in one metre, and how many metres are in a kilometre etc.
1 cm = 10 mm
1 m = 100 cm
1 km = 1 000 m
It's so simple. What is 1/12 of 1 kilometre? (1/12) * 1'000 = 0,083 kilometres, which is 83 metres. You can get centimetres, millimetres, whatever you want. That's 8 300 metres, and 83 000 centimetres respectively.