TIL fractions don't exist in the metric system.
this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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We wouldn't normally say "I'd like a 18/100 kilogram burger"...
well they do, but since it's metric it's always 1/10 1/100 ... and they have their own name so no math needed
No one went to A&W for burgers back then, footlong chili dog and root beer.
This, exactly.
Anyone repeating this 1/4 vs 1/3 bullshit never had one of their 1/3lb burgers. They were fucking terrible. Sysco prison-grade burger patties, drowned in store-brand ketchup with a thin slice of "American"-flavored yellow #5.
Absolute worst burger I've ever had.
Growing up, A&W was for chili dogs and a big glass mug of rootbeer. Never order anything else; its always a fat sack of disappointment.
That must have been a US thing. A&W in Canada has had excellent Teen burgers for decades.
I will make a 1/100 pound burger, instant money machine
Pretty sure fractions are pure math & not metric or imperial.
Americans do be dumb AF, though.
Yes and no. Imperial measurements that are not integers are displayed in fractions. Hence quarterpounders and thirpounders. In metrics, fractions are rarely used. Because the scales are more granular and because non-integers are usually displayed in decimals.
People thinking a third-pound-burger being smaller than a quarterpounder could not have happened with metrics, because, well, look at the title.
I’m from a country where we use metric and can’t think of anything that would normally be displayed as a fraction. Sure we know what half and third are, but they’re not used officially for anything
You've never had to halve a recipe before? Which is easier to do in your head, half of 78.862 milliliters or half of 1/3 cup?
No recipe lists 78.862 mm of anything.
A recipe with metric units will default to gram amounts that are divisible by ten and thus infinitely easier to halve than "5/8 of your grandmother's good cake spoon" or any such folksy nonsense.
Are Europeans afraid of fractions or something? It's way quicker to mentally add 9/16 and 3/8 compared to 0.5625 and 0.3750...
Like I get that metric is better but "metric is when no fractions" make 0/1 sense.
Edit - tfw you get ratiod by "9+6 is hard" in a thread about people not understanding basic arithmetic
xD
I’m a lifelong American and neither of these are easy, but the decimals are much more like real numbers to me.
I encounter decimal points in my day to day interactions with numbers. Not so with fractions.
I will start learning fractions when restaurants put them in their prices.
“That will be $4 and 3/4,” said no one ever, thank gob.
Imperial measurements that are not integers are displayed in fractions.
Often, they're not: look at packaging labels especially in grocery stores. Engineers use decimals regardless of unit.
Weight scales in the US don't mark 1⁄3.
Quarter & third likely show up for verbal ease/brevity of naming: saying 250 grams is a bit of mouthful & unlikely for naming anything. I suspect if Americans used metric, they might still use fractions to refer to burgers by weight/mass in kg (like drugs!).
In metrics, fractions are rarely used.
Also convention. Nothing prevents 1⁄3 kg, 1⁄4 kg, and I'd expect to see 1⁄3 kg more often than 0.3̅ kg if rounding were avoided.
In metric, Americans still would get this wrong, because they don't understand fractions despite using them. Or are you suggesting everyone would get the order of 1⁄3 kg & 1⁄4 kg wrong?
Americans rarely see 1/3. We typically only use binary fractions: halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths. Occasionally, 32nds. Smaller than that, we use decimal.
Obviously 1/3 vs 1/4 is the same distinction regardless of unit. But part of the whole idea of metric is avoiding dealing with fractions in lieu of decimals. It's inherently less fraction-heavy.
Fractions are more accurate. You can't display 1/3 as a decimal. Americans are dumb, but this isn't an imperial versus metric thing.
1/3 = 0.(3) (repeating)
2/3 = 0.(6)
3/3 = 0.(9) which is equal to 1 btw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999..
Despite common misconceptions, 0.999... is not "almost exactly 1" or "very, very nearly but not quite 1"; rather, "0.999..." and "1" represent exactly the same number.
Your accuracy goes out of the window when you are actually measuring things though. The error is as significant as rounding 1/3 to 0.33
Not rounding. Mathematically, 0.(3) (repeating) is the exact same as 1/3
Had they adopted the metric system
Or at least had an education system capable of teaching basic maths
Sounds to me like they missed the opportunity to sell a 1/5 burger for more instead.
A regular McDonald's hamburger is 1/10, I think people would have figured it out at that point.
Fifthy pounder on the way
Americans if they adopted the metric system: ".25kg > .5kg"
".25kg > .5kg"
Which one of those is a third?
Deoends on whether you're asking for a third of 0.75kg or a third of 1.5 kg
0.25 > 0.3
0.03333333333333333~
Missed a bit
Classic.
But that's easy to solve by just adding a zero to .5
.25kg < .50kg
Though I could see some profit seeking companies selling a .250 burger for 25% more than their .25 burger.
It's not like Americans need bigger food.
"try our new 113g burger"
Yes, I've literally seen baked goods advertised like that. One bakery in my town is proud of its bigger-than-average pretzels and puts the weight right there on the ad posters.
Americans are every bit as capable of assuming a 1/8 kg burger is bigger than a 1/6 kg burger.
If we're talking about a focus group specifically comprised of regular fast food consumers, you're already kinda pre-selecting for the lowest common denominator.
No surprise that this segment would have lower education overall
Carl's Jr. did the same thing. The 1/3 pound was perfect. Two 1/4 patties are too much, one 1/4 patty is too little.
I miss the Carl's Jr. 1/3 pound burger.
I thought this was kind of a myth? I recall it being something like the quarter pounder was just well marketed so beat out even bigger burgers.
Wikipedia confirmed though:
The A&W research firm organized focus groups. The results revealed that many participants mistakenly believed that one-third of a pound was smaller than one-fourth (quarter) of a pound. Focus group participants expressed confusion over the price, asking why they should pay the same amount for a "smaller" third-pound burger.
This misunderstanding stemmed from consumers focusing on the numbers "3" and "4," leading them to conclude that one-third (1/3) was smaller than one-fourth (1/4), even though the opposite is true.[2]
A similar explanation appeared in The New York Times in 2014, citing the third-pound burger as one of the most vivid examples of consumer arithmetic failure.[3] In taste tests, customers actually preferred A&W's burger to McDonald's, and it was less expensive.
According to a CBC report, more than half of the people surveyed about the burger said they didn't buy it because they thought they were getting less meat.[4]
This is even more interesting if you notice that Americans use fractions a lot, maybe even more than countries with metric system. It’s 1/2 pound, 5/8 inch, 3/4 mile and so on. Countries with metric system just change the units. Typically we don’t say 1/2 km, we say 500m.
That's interesting. I never really noticed it but I'm not a fan of changing units. Whatever the "base unit" is for something is what I'll use, even if it crosses the order of magnitude threshold.
Metric always gets decimal though, and sae units get fractions.
I've gotten myself switched to metric for kitchen weights and volume, and for small distances in projects I'm working on.
I'll buy a 1/2 pound of meat, and then measure out 200 grams, with 100 ml of stock and 0.5 grams of something-small-i-cant-think-of-for-an-example-recipie.
Saying 500 milligrams feels wrong. So does asking for 1000 ml of pop though, since that's the "wrong unit".
I think there's something baked into the American brain that says unit conversion is a source of error and should be avoided. Converting from 1 mile to 2640 feet is obviously gonna cause issues.
As for the fractions, I think that's because sae units developed in a context where division by whole numbers was helpful, and metric was designed so that division by 10 was consistent and predictable.
Nothing intrinsically wrong with fractional units, other than 1/3 meter being a less reasonable number of centimeters than the inches in 1/3 yard.
I suppose it's much more rare for us to use 1/3 specifically. It does show up in cooking, but even there it's hidden in the units a lot of the time.
Oof.
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