THE ACTUAL METRIC SYSTEM:

I learned English as a second language. Becoming an Anglophone turned out to be a crucially advantage in a brief scientific career years later. (I once worked as a medicinal chemist.) English is de rigueur for many things, but especially for science. More than three-quarters of scientific papers today are published in English--and in some fields it is more than 90 percent, according to data compiled by Scott Montgomery in his book Does Science Need a Global Language?.

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