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>If baking, are you more likely to take a recipe and halve it or cut it by a factor of ten? You are more likely to halve it. How does the "American" system hel

• spc476 12y ago
  Well, half a pound of butter is two sticks (butter here is typically sold in four-stick packages weighing a pound; each stick being 4 oz) and half a quart of milk is a pint (also sold in grocery stores; it's also two cups).
• Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
  Not that inconsistent; if you look up the scale, you'll see that most ratios are powers of two; sometimes there's an occasional 1/3, like the teaspoon to tablespoon ratio. What is convenient is that the ratios are small; as soon as you need a bigger amount, you just use bigger units. This not only keeps the math simpler, but also indicates the precision of the numbers; "1 cup" means you can err by a tablespoon, perhaps, but "16 tablespoons" (although formally equal to 1 cup) indicates much higher degree of precision. In metric countries, however, you routinely see recipes like "140 g cornmeal" or hear people asking for "500 g meat" in a grocery store. Nobody really deals with these things in grams, but still somehow everybody uses grams here. The inventors of the metric system might think there would be decagrams or gectograms, but I've never heard of such units and even my spell checker just underlined them; somehow people using metric system ended up with kilograms and grams, units of 1:1000 ratio.