How come people say 5,000 km and not 5 Mm?
why not just say millions of meters or Mega meters?
1 point
The beauty of the metric system is you don’t lose a sense of scale from using a higher unit because you can intuitively know 1Mm is 1000km.
1 point
True, but not everyone has that in the forefront of their mind at all times. Just like using millions of dollars and billions of dollars in the same sentence can distract people from the scale, the same is true for SI prefixes in non-technical settings. Like, say, negotiations over buying a used car.
