Easy Metric Conversion Tips, Without Tables (Rated PG-13)

A Few Tricks to Convert Units

Thirty years ago, some smart folks told me that "metric is the future". Well, the future is here, and metric still hasn't taken America by storm, making us a more rational nation. However, the world has gotten a lot smaller, and more and more, we're faced with dealing with both metric and imperial units. (I bet you didn't know "feet and inches" were called imperial units.) Here are some easy tricks and tips you can learn while you're waiting around.

Google It!
The most important trick is to learn to use Google. If you type something like "1 pint to gallons" or "36 inches to meters", it'll do the math for you.

Liters to Quarts and Gallons (How big is that 2 liter bottle, anyway?)
A liter and quart are virtually identical. A liter is around 1/4 cup more than a quart. So, 2 liters is around 1/2 a gallon. 4 liters is around a gallon.

By the way, a quart is 1/4th of a gallon, or "one quarter of a gallon." (Duh! It only took me 30 years to learn that one.)

2 pints make a quart. 2 cups make a pint. How many cups in a gallon? Multiply 2 x 2 x 4, for 16 cups. That's the same as 8 pints. Now... if you think about guys drinking three pints of beer, and don't think that's much. Consider that's nearly half a gallon of beer.

1 liter is nearly 34 ounces. So it's a little more than a 32 ouncer, aka a Big Gulp at 7-11.

Milliliters or CCs to Teaspoons, Tablespoons and Cups
Sometimes, you get packaged food that says to add milliliters (ml) of soy sauce or something like that. 5 ml is 1 teaspoon. 15 ml is 1 tablespoon.
100 ml is .42 cups, or just shy of a half cup. 300 ml is 1 1/4 cup. Milliliters don't convert to cups too well.

Pounds to Kilograms
How much is a kilo (kg) of cocaine, anyway? It's 2.2 pounds. A large navel orange weighs a little bit more than a pound, and two make around a kilo.
Another way to think of it, is that a pound is around a half-kilo.

Incidentally, one neat trick is to use metric to convert from volume measurements to weights. Metric made up a rule that says one gram is equal to the weight of one ml of water. So 1 kg is 1,000 ml of water, or 1 liter of water. So a 1 liter bottle of water weighs 1 kg, or 2.2 pounds!