ANY change from imperial to metric measures is likely to confuse the young as well as the old, according to a Times straw poll yesterday.

A dozen people, half over the age of 30 and half under 30, were asked to answer three relatively simple questions: how many yards are there in a mile, how many kilometres per hour is 70mph and how many litres are there in a gallon?

No one answered all three correctly and two of the questions were only answered correctly once. The number of yards in a mile ranged from 52 to 10,000 (the correct answer is 1,760) and the number of litres in a gallon was as low as 2.25 and as high as 1,000 (it is 4.5).

Nick Crowther, 31, thought that there were 10,000 yards in a mile and 50 litres in a gallon, but his answer to the second question — 120km/h instead of 113km/h — was not far off. “I never needed to know. I never wanted to know. I never learnt about it,” said Mr Crowther, a sales manager from West Yorkshire. Carol, 46, who did not want to disclose her full name, gave the same answer to every question: “I have absolutely no idea.”

The only person who knew that there were 1,760 yards in a mile was Brendan Delaney, 53, but it was the only question that the senior technician from Purley, Surrey, got right.

Nadia Bawden, 18, an A-level student, thought there were 1,000 litres in a gallon. “A gallon sounds like a lot,” she said.

Nick Ward, 18, said that there were 52 yards in a mile and thought 50km/h was equivalent to 70mph. But he was almost correct in guessing that there were 4 litres in a gallon.

Francis Malone-Lee, a 25-year-old actuary from Essex, came the closest to answering all questions correctly. He got the third question right and was just one mile an hour off on the second question. But he thought that there were 1,880 yards in a mile: “I know how many metres there are in a mile — 1,609. It’s easy because I’m a runner. I think in metric, except for miles. Nobody knows what a kilometre is.”

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