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Have you ever bought a ton of anything?
Did you put it on the scales and make sure that it was exactly one million grams or go, "yh, that looks like it's about a ton".?
That's why the term ton is popular, the term megagram only really makes sense when you need your "ton" to be precisely one million grams.
I do not think this is a good take. I buy kilograms of sugar, wheat, I measure my body weight in kilograms and I do not need these measurements to be accurate to one thousandths.
And yeah, I have bought a ton of something, coal.
It's a ton (or metric tonne, fine) because people are just used to it, I wouldn't have a problem if everybody started using megagrams, but most people wouldn't even know what it means, especially elderly or people raised with SI but not "getting" SI ("centigrams? do you mean centimeters?").
It's just a well known alias, nothing else.
Honestly I don't know what a ton looks like. I've bought stuff like gravel and even the guy selling it had no idea. I asked for half a ton which is the legal limit on my trailer and because the skid-loader didn't have a scale in the grapple he said "I'm just gonna eyeball it". Then on the scale where they do the payment it showed 2 ton, so I had to manually shovel 1.5 ton of gravel off.
Sure I can visualise a ton of water because it's such a nice unit, but everything else makes no sense. Cubic metres is a much better measurement to visualise.
Beg to differ. That's kind of an imperial measurement system way of thinking about units. But there's probably some truth to it.
No. Tolerance is tolerance no matter what the unit is. There is implied tolerance but that's also the same for "one A" and "one B" no matter what A and B are.
If you bought a ton of coal and the tolerance was ±5Kg who's scales are you using when it gets delivered to your house?
Or are you looking at size of the bag and thinking, yep, looks like a ton.
My local water services sells it by the ton.