1. Storey
www.dailymail.co.uk
A storey (stories in American English) is measurement of floors or levels of the buildings and other structures. It is used to express the height of every floor of the building. In United States it’s usually from 8 to 10 feet, or 2.4 to 3 meters. Although there’s no official global office block building code standard it’s widely considered that one storey is 3 meters.
2. Football Field
www.dbarkertv.com
Pitches where the games of world’s most popular sport are played are commonly used as a unit of area. Although the standard of the football fields vary, it’s related with the standard UEFA Champions League field, which is always 105×68 meters, an area of 7140m2. In United States the football field (known as American Football field in the rest of the world) is with dimension 360×160 feet, which is an area of 57600 square feet.
3. France
www.liris.cnrs.fr
Russia is the largest country in the world, so they can make laugh of the size of others. In Soviet time, when Russia competed with the countries all over the world, the unit of are “France” became very popular. It was used to describe the area of Siberian regions. The most common phrase was “kak dve Francii,” that means “like two Frances” or “twice the size of France.”
4. Fully Loaded 747
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Fully loaded early model of Boeing 747 is 360 tons (800 000 pounds) heavy. When someone wants to express something extremely heavy, he can use the phrase “heavy as 3 fully loaded 747s.”
5. Hiroshima Bomb
www.phys.boun.edu.tr
This one is really weird. Geologists often use the unit of energy called Hiroshima bomb to express the energy released by explosion. The atomic bomb in Hiroshima released 6×1013 J, so this is the measure that has to be reached for geologists to say that there was on Hiroshima bomb explosion energy released by bombs, volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts.
6. Jiffy
www.interaccess.org
Jiffy is unit of time measuring used in computing world. It describes the time needed for one thick of the system timer interrupt. It’s usually 0.01 seconds today, but in earlier systems it was used to express 1/60 of the second.
7. Shake
www.commons.wikimedia.org
Shake is unit of time that derives from the old colloquial expression “two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” However, you’ll be surprised that it’s not used in livestock, but in nuclear engineering. One shake describes very short period of time, exactly 10 nanoseconds.
8. Elephant
www.all-freeware.com
If fully loaded 747 define the weight of heavy objects in general, paleontologists didn’t accept that. The unit elephant was more appropriate for them. One elephant (African bull elephant) is used to describe 6 tons weight of very large dinosaurs.
9. Stere
www.photocompetition.hispeed.ch
The stere is almost the same as cubic meter when used for describing the quantity of wood. The difference is that the wood in one stere is piled up woodblocks, while one cubic meter consist non-piled ones. That means that one stere is a little bit less than one cubic meter. This measurement is usually used in Holland and some countries in Northern Europe.
10. Wales
www.flickr.com
Although people of England and Wales live together in one country, there’s still some rivalry between them. English people often use the measure “Wales,” named by their small neighbor, to describe an area 20,779 km². It a radio show in England in humorous was it was proposed the use of kiloWales for an area 1000 times the size of Wales.
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