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Is 200 ft by 200 ft equal to one acre? A piece of land that measures 200 ft by 200 ft is the equivalent of 40,000 square feet. One acre contains 43,560 square feet, making the 200 x 200 ft land equal to approximately 0.918 acres.
Gee, if only someone would come up with a system that properly ordered scales of measurement in a logical and sensible way...
Yeah it looks stupid when you do it like that, almost the same thing as if I told you there was 3,280 feet in a kilometer. Feet are not the base unit here, the mile is.
Asked Google again. Is this it?
How many acres are in a mile by a mile? 1 Square Mile = 640 Acres. There are 640 acres in a square mile, because an acre is defined as an area of 66 feet to 660 feet and equals to 66 * 660 = 43560 square feet and one mile is 5280 feet and one sq.
Because it isn't really helping it either.
Ignore everything about feet. That's the different base unit. Idk how else to describe this, they're using "defined" when they mean "described"? The mile is the base unit. Feet are the base unit of a different system.
Well, there's your problem. That the base units don't fit into each other neatly.
They do until someone decides to mix systems. Feet and miles are two different base units. Like I tried to express, it's like saying metric is stupid if I decide to define kilometers in feet. Its the same thing, but older when you try define miles and acres in feet. Stick to 640 fractional.
You are arguing an indefensible point of view
You are arguing a base ignorance of history.
Gee, if only someone would come up with a system that properly ordered scales of measurement in a logical and sensible way…
No use, even if somebody come up with such a system, adoption of such would be impossible due to "this is the way we always did it"
The acre was used to subdivide up square miles. It makes more sense if you know 43,650 = 660 * 66. Also, 660 feet is exactly 1/8 of a mile. So once a square mile had been surveyed, you could split each side in half to get 4 squares of 160 acres. You could then split each of those again to get 40 acres (hence the "40 acres and a mule"), and then you could split them again to get 10-acre squares. Then you could split them into 5-acre rectangles, etc. The rectangles are good at keeping access to an existing road, although the skinniness isn't great. And all of these sub-divisions could live on the same grid.
Why don't meters go into light years or parsecs nicely?
Anyways, an acre is the area people would plow by ox in one day. You measured fields by the acre because in a medieval society that said something really interesting about how many farm workers you needed for a given area.
Similarly, a mile comes from the Latin for 'thousand paces', which is a fairly natural way for people on foot to measure distances.
Much like how light year says something scientifically interesting about distances to stars so we use it instead of petameters or zettameters in astronomy, people used acres and miles despite them not going into feet well.
It works because you generally don't convert between light years and meters, or acres and feet. They mostly just exist at different scales.