British measurements: pints, feet, Celsius, and more!

If you’re interested in British culture, you need to know British measurements. It’s useful to know about the different measurement systems, and interesting to learn how they came to be used. In the UK, we use a combination of imperial and metric measurements. In this lesson I will explain the British measurements we use for height, weight, distance, and temperature. I’ll also teach you some vocabulary connected with measurement. Watch the video, then take the quiz at and see how you measure up! Hi. I’m Gill at , and today’s lesson is all about wonderful “British Measurements“. Okay? The way that we measure things like height, how high somebody is (in my case, not very high); weight, how much people weigh (and again, in my case, not very much); how food and drink are weighed, like the volume, the quantity; property, like space in houses, the space, the shape of a room, how big a room is; things like temperature, how hot or cold it is in a room; and things like in farming, land, the amount of space that belongs to a farm for agriculture or dairy farming, or whatever. Okay, so there are all these different things that have to be measured. I’m sure you have your own system in your country. You may use a similar system to us, but in the U.K., we actually now have a mixture of two systems which makes it a little bit complicated. We have an older system called the “imperial system“, which is not based on 10. A lot of things from our old systems were not based on units of 10 or 100 or 1,000, a little bit like the old money that we used to have, which we’re talking about in another lesson. So, the imperial system, all sorts of strange numbers for different things; for height, weight, etc. And then, though, when we joined the European community, the European Union, as it’s now called, we became part of Europe, and because a lot of European countries, probably all of them, were using the “metric system“, we had to take on that system as well. Okay. But it’s very difficult to suddenly change from one system to another. So, what we have now is a mixture of both. And for different categories of measurements, we either use imperial or metric, or sometimes both together just to... So that you can choose which one to look at. Okay, so let’s just start by looking at height. So, my height would be measured in feet and inches. Okay? Now, I’ve got a tape measure, here. It’s quite an old tape measure, and it’s marked on both sides. And these are inches, so where you can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, going across, those are inches. Okay? And if I go up to 12... So, here we are, it’s not a 10, it’s a 12, 12 inches are one foot. So we’ve got feet and inches. One foot and several feet. So this tape measure, actually, it goes up to 60... It goes up to 60 inches. There’s 59, there’s 60. So 60 inches. Divide 60 by 12, that gives you 5. So this tape measure is 5 feet. So you can see from that, I’m just over 5 feet. I’m actually 5 feet, 2 inches. Okay? My height. So, that is how people generally, in the U.K., measure their height. So it’s not metres. So, if you’re talking to an English friend and you ask them: “How tall are you?“ “Tall“ is a useful word. “How tall are you?“ They will probably reply, if they are English or British, they will probably reply in feet and inches; whereas you, perhaps, might know your own height in metres. Okay? So, that’s quite difficult. You can find websites on the internet which do conversions, so it’s very easy if you just Google: “convert feet-metres“, you can find a little calculator to do the conversions, so it’s okay, it just takes a bit of time. Right. So, feet and inches. So there are 12 inches in one foot. So, instead of 10, the unit is 12. 12 inches in one foot, and then if you have 3 feet, 3 feet, which is 36 inches, that’s called a yard. That is one yard. And I think it’s a little bit less than one metre, just slightly less than one metre. So, 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard. 3 feet in a yard. And then, anything bigger than a yard, we... When we go up to a mile, which is a lot, lot longer than a yard, how many do we have? We have 1,760 yards in a mile. So, 1,760 yards in a mile. So you can see all these numbers: 12, 3, 1,760, they’re... There’s no tens or hundreds in there; it’s all very, very strange mixtures of numbers. Okay? So that’s the way it is. Some people put both. If I put 5 foot 2, I might put in brackets metres. Okay? So, it’s a random number; it’s not a very equal number.