On Sunday 30 September 2007 22:12, Jon Saxton wrote: > Meanwhile, what is the area of this rectangle? > > 297 mm x 210 mm > or > 8 1/4 " x 11 11/16" > > Hint: One you can do on a calculator.
A better example would involve both feet and fractions of inches, which are used together in architectural drawings. Surveyors have used decimal ever since Gunter, and when someone gives us a drawing of a house, we have to convert the fractions of inches to decimal. Metric architectural drawings are in millimeters, and metric surveys are in meters to three places, so you just insert a decimal point. Even when working in feet, I'd prefer a metric house drawing (draw it as given, then scale). A common computation in architecture is the diagonal of a rectangle, used when staking it to make sure that the angles are right. Which would you rather do: Diagonal of 30 m by 30 m rectangle to the nearest millimeter, or Diagonal of 90 ft by 90 ft rectangle to the nearest 1/32 inch? The first one I can do in my head. Pierre
