Education is one of the most important aspects in this life. It happens that not every person gets basic education. The situation is even worse in third world countries. Even though these countries are catching up in terms of technology and education, it is not accessible to everyone. For instance, some two years ago, I went for a research related fieldwork to one country in Africa. We were asking very simple questions to these people to see whether they have the basic knowledge. Among the general questions that we were asking is how many cm in an inch.

How many cm in an inch is a question that may look very simple to most people but the truth it that it was not as simple as we thought it was. We walked around the city in that developing country and the eastern part of Africa asking the question to different people. Among the people we targeted were those who looked well informed and those how looked normal or with just the general education. Asked how many cm exactly in an inch, most people within the city had no idea that one centimeter has 2.54cm. However, this can be described as one of the most difficult questions in that people are used to measuring centimeters and feet. They therefore were not able to covert centimeters to inches.

In our research, we took a notch higher by giving questionnaires with the question of how many cm in an inch to students who were in junior high school. We then tried to follow trace them all through their school life to try to understand where they would get the information on the question. A sizeable proportion of these students belonged to grade three and grade four. Those who were from grade three would ask their teacher for assistance on the questions. This was not the case with those from grade four.

The students from grade four were able to walk to the computer lab and type the entire question, how many cm in an inch, on Google search engine and they had the results. They were able to fill the questionnaire giving details of how many cm in every inch, how many inches make a foot and all the other standard dimensions. This showed development and penetration of technology in education in all parts of the world. This is a great move and it is prove of how a global village the world has become.