You may have thought going metric was just a fad of the '70s. But it was voluntary, after all. Maybe you thought the idea went out with bell-bottoms, but the truth is, according to a recent story from the Boston Globe, the government has slowly but steadily changed over everything they can while the rest of us weren't looking. It's got metric written all over it. The government estimates, in fact, that 30 percent of all U.S. products are metric.
Greek prefixes are used to show multiples of the base unit, so they make the base unit larger.
Hecto, for example, means 100 times, and kilo means 1,000 times. Latin prefixes, on the other hand, make the base unit smaller. We're not sure what that says about the Greeks and Romans. But it was the French who invented the system, back in the 1790s. Length and distance measurements are based on the meter, and all units are decimal fractions or multiples of the meter.