Measurement: Miscellaneous

Bed Sizes

This section is emphatically not science, but there's not enough to merit a page of its own and I couldn't think where else to put it.

I feel there's some potential for controversy here, as there doesn't appear to be any official ruling. The following came from the website of The Oak Bed Store (a UK online bed retailer). Wikipedia (needless to say) has a comprehensive page on the subject, giving sizes from around the world. Wikipedia takes the view that UK retailers are now obliged to sell in metric sizes, and gives the nearest Imperial equivalents (in inches) to the metric sizes. It refers to the Imperial sizes given here as "previous" sizes. In my experience, if you're ever asked about bed sizes in a quiz, these are the ones that are used; so I've stuck with what Wikipedia calls the "previous" Imperial sizes.

You may notice that while the Imperial and metric measures of width are approximately equivalent, the lengths are even less exactly so.

I haven't bothered to hide the answers, as I can't really imagine anyone wanting to test themselves on this.

Other

The power required to lift 550 pounds by one foot in one second (33,000 in a minute)		1 horsepower
Watts in a horsepower		746
Weight of a gallon of water		10 lbs

Speed of light (in a vacuum)	Miles per second			186,230
	Metres per second			2.9979 * 108
Speed of sound (in air at 20°C)	Miles per hour			768
	Kilometres per hour			1,236
	Feet per second			1,126
	Metres per second			343.2
Time taken for sound to travel (in air at 20°C)	One mile			4.689 seconds
	One kilometre			2.914 seconds

Imperial gallons in a barrel of oil		34.97
US gallons in a barrel of oil		42
Metres in a nautical mile (international definition, adopted in Britain 1970)		1852
Inches in a span (conventionally)		9
Inches in a cubit (approximately – sources vary between 18 and 22)		20
Unit of pressure, equivalent to 760 mm of mercury; defined as exactly equal to 100,000 pascals (Pa), which is slightly less than the average atmospheric pressure at the Earth's surface; not an SI unit, but its 1,000th part (equivalent to 100 pascals or one hectopascal) is commonly used in weather forecasting		Bar

Acceleration due to gravity, at the surface of the Earth	In feet per second per second		32 fps2
	In metres per second per second		9.8 mps2

1 mile per hour, in feet per second			1.466
Defined as the amount of land that can be ploughed by a yoke of oxen in a day – one chain by one furlong			Acre
Basic Anglo–Saxon unit of length – survived after 1066 as 1/3 of an inch			Barleycorn
One tenth of a nautical mile (185.2 metres or 608 feet – originally 100 fathoms; 120 fathoms, or 720 feet, in the US Navy)			Cable
The three basic units (equivalent to the metre, kilogram and second in the MKS and SI systems) in the system whose adoption was recommended in 1873 by a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, including physicists James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson; known (in the same way as MKS) by the initials of these three units; it has been almost completely superseded by MKS, and more specifically SI			Centimetre
			Gram
			Second
Defined as the length of a man's arm, from elbow to end of the middle finger			Cubit
Originally a small copper coin created by Charlemagne, of which the British equivalent was the penny; now the unit of weight for silk, rayon or nylon			Denier
The unit used to measure the optical power of a lens: equal to the reciprocal of the focal length in metres			Dioptre
Used in the tailoring industry, up to the 19th century: originally equivalent to the cubit			Ell
The unit of work or energy in the CGS system of measurement: equivalent to 10-7 joules (one ten millionth of a joule, or 100 nanojoules)			Erg
1/20th of a pint in Imperial units and 1/16th of a pint in the USA			Fluid ounce
The length of furrow that a yoke of oxen is considered capable of ploughing without resting			Furlong
Word used informally to indicate a very short, but unspecified, period of time: has also been used in various scientific contexts, the first of which (according to Wikipedia) was the time it takes light to travel one centimetre in a vacuum (approximately 33.3564 picoseconds, or 3.33564 * 10–11 seconds)			Jiffy
One nautical mile per hour			Knot
Ancient European measure of the distance that a person (or a horse) can walk in an hour; defined in ancient Rome as 3 miles			League
The ratio of a body's speed to that of sound; named in honour of an Austrian physicist and philosopher (1838–1916)			Mach number
The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is most commonly expressed in			Megatons (of TNT)
Historically defined as one minute (i.e. one sixtieth of a degree) of latitude, or the average length of one minute of arc along a great circle of the Earth			Nautical mile
Traditionally defined, in the UK, as 6,080 ft (1,853.2480 metres); internationally defined in 1929 as 1852 metres
The unit used to measure font size (equivalent to one seventy–second of an inch in desktop publishing)			Point
Albedo (used mainly in astronomy and climatology) is a measure of			Reflectivity
A unit of weight (varying between 9 and 17 grams) first used in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC – also a coin of this weight, especially the chief silver coin of the Hebrews; now the Israeli unit of currency			Shekel
USA: 36 square miles			Township
The property by which engine oils are graded – the universal standard being that of the US Society of Automobile Engineers (SAE)			Viscosity

© Haydn Thompson 2017–21