b>International System of Units (abbreviated SI from French: Le Système international d'unités) is the modern form of the metric system. Published in 1960, it comprises a coherent system of units of measurement built around seven base units, 22 named and an indeteminate number of unnamed coherent derived units and a set prefixes that act as decimal-based multipliers. It is based on the metre-kilogram-second system, rather than the centimetre-gram-second system, which, in turn, had several variants. The SI has been declared to be an evolving system; thus prefixes and units are created and unit definitions are modified through international agreement as the technology of measurement progresses, and as the precision of measurements improves. SI is the world's most widely used system of measurement, used in both everyday commerce and science.
The system has been nearly globally adopted with Burma, Liberia and the United States not having adopted SI units as their official system of weights and measures. While only the US does not commonly use metric units outside of science, medicine, and the government, the United Kingdom has officially adopted a partial metrication policy, with no intention of replacing imperial units entirely. Canada has adopted it for most purposes but imperial units are still legally permitted and remain in common use throughout a few sectors of Canadian society, particularly in the buildings, trades and railways sectors.
Read more about International System Of Units: History, SI Brochure and Conversion Factors, Units and Prefixes
Famous quotes containing the words system and/or units:
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)