Metric System

Introduction of metric system commissioned by the French government in 1791 created a platform to set a standard for all the measures and all the weights. The metric system had been widely accepted and adopted internationally as the simplest way to measure unknown physical quantities, such as distance, weight, volume and time. It replaced all the traditional units, except the units of time and angle measure under the following three conditions.

1. One fundamental unit is defined for each quantity.
2. Fractions and multiples of these fundamental units are created by adding prefixes to the names of the defined units.
3. The fundamental units are defined rationally and are related to each other in a rational manner.

All the units in the metric system are multiplied by 10 (to make larger units) or divided by 10 (to make smaller units). For example a kilometer is 1000 meters (10 x 10 x 10). Today the International System of Units commonly known as SI Units is adopted and widely used throughout the world for commercial, personal and scientific purposes with the exception of the United States of America, Liberia and Myanmar.