The Isolated American

Yesterday, I realized how insulated we are in America. I was looking for a metric tape measure – I knew I had one around as I use it for bike/ski work, but couldn’t find it anywhere. I did, though, find 4 other tape measures and 3 rulers – none of which had a metric scale.
Which, of course, got me wondering how many Americans speak another language (not counting Spanish spoken by new immigrants), how many of us have a clue how many kilometers are in a mile, how few of us can begin to convert Centigrade (Celsius) into Fahrenheit, even how few Americans have passports (at least until the new travel initiatives requiring passports between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean).