What Is The Difference Between Imperial And Metric Systems?

Do you have any confusion with distinguishing what is the difference between imperial and metric systems?

There are two main systems for measuring distances and weight, the Imperial System of Measurement and the Metric System of Measurement. Most countries use the Metric System, which uses measuring units such as meters and grams and adds prefixes like kilo, milli and centi to count orders of magnitude. In the United States, people use the older Imperial system, where things are measured in feet, inches, and pounds. The picture below is the main use area difference between the imperial and metric systems.

The Metric and Imperial systems are both systems of measurement. That is, they are not just one unit of measure, but are inter-related systems of many units of measure – measuring length and area, weight and mass, volume, force, energy, power, time, temperature, luminosity, etc.

Metric and Imperial differ in almost all of the particular units used in the two systems (meters vs feet, kilograms vs pounds, etc.). However, they share units measuring time (seconds, minutes, hours) and electricity (volts, amperes, watts, ohms, etc.) — Time, because no one was successful in decimalizing it, and electricity because it is newer than either the Metric or Imperial system.

The Imperial System is also called The British Imperial because it came from the British Empire that ruled many parts of the world from the 16th to the 19th century. After the U.S gained independence from Britain, the new American government decided to keep this type of measurement, even though the metric system was gaining in popularity at the time.

Here are a few things to remember that will come in handy day today:

1 mile equals 1.6 Kilometers.
1 inch is about 25 millimeters or 2.54 centimeters
A 3-foot measurement is almost exactly 1 meter
1 Kilogram is just over 2 pounds
1 pound is about 454 grams
For British visitors, 100 pounds = 7.14 stone

By the way, the temperature scales are different too. We didn’t want to make things too easy for you! Though not technically part of the metric system, Americans measure temperature in Fahrenheit, not Centigrade.

Here are some more handy conversions for temperature:

0 degrees Celsius is equal to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. (The freezing point)
24 degrees Celsius is equal to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. (A very pleasant day)
To convert Celcius (c) to Fahrenheit, use the formula (c * 1.8) + 32

If you need to convert from Imperial or US Standard units to Metric, or the other way around, one of the tables of difference between imperial and metric below should help.

LENGTH

AREA

VOLUME/CAPACITY

MASS

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