Usage Around The World
Further information: MetricationThe usage of the metric system varies around the world. According to the US Central Intelligence Agency's Factbook, the International System of Units has been adopted as the official system of weights and measures by all nations in the world except for Burma, Liberia and the United States, while NIST has claimed that the United States is the only industrialised country where the metric system is not the official system of units. Some sources, though, suggest that this information is out of date. An Agence France-Presse report from 2010 stated that Sierra Leone, not Liberia, had continued to use the Imperial system, but had passed a law to enact metrication, in line with its Mano River Union (MRU) neighbours Guinea and Liberia. Reports from Burma suggest that that country is planning to adopt the metric system also.
In the United States, where the use of metric units was authorised by Congress in 1866, such units are widely used in science, military, and partially in industry, but customary units predominate in household use. At retail stores the litre is a commonly used unit for volume, especially on bottles of beverages, and milligrams are used to denominate the amounts of medications, rather than grains. Also, other standardised measuring systems other than metric are still in universal international use, such as nautical miles and knots in international aviation.
In the countries of the Commonwealth of Nations the metric system has replaced the imperial system by varying degrees: Australia, New Zealand and Commonwealth countries in Africa are almost totally metric, India is mostly metric, Canada is partly metric while in the United Kingdom the metric system, the use of which was first permitted for trade in 1864, is used in much government business, in most industries including building, health and engineering and for pricing by measure or weight in most trading situations, both wholesale and retail. However the imperial system is often used by journalists and continues to be used in many unregulated applications.
A number of other jurisdictions, such as Hong Kong, have laws mandating or permitting other systems of measurement in parallel with the metric system in some or all contexts.
Read more about this topic: Metric System
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