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Interesting that I learned 32.2 ft/s, but only 9.8 m/s - one less significant figure, but only a factor of two in precision (32.2 vs 32 = .6%; 9.81 vs 9.8 is only 0.1%). Here's the fun part - as a practicing engineer for three decades, both in aerospace and in industry, it's exceedingly rare that precision of 0.1% will lead to a better result. Now, people doing physics and high-accuracy detection based on physical parameters really do use that kind of precision and it matters. But for almost every physical object and mechanism in ordinary life, refining to better than 1% is almost always wasted effort.
Being off by 10/9.81x is usually less than the amount that non-modeled conditions will affect the design of a component. Thermal changes, bolt tensions, humidity, temperature, material imperfections, and input variance all conspire to invalidate my careful calculations. Finding the answer to 4 decimal places is nice, but being about to get an answer within 5% or so in your head, quickly, and on site where a solution is needed quickly makes you look like a genius.
I gotta say, that explanations sounds way better than shrugging and saying "close enough". But then again our teachers usually say "fanden være med det" meaning "devil be with that" actually meaning "Fu*k it" when it comes to those small deviations
There's a lot of wisdom in that. ;-)
Even then, once you figure in a safety factor of 2 or 3 as a minimum, the extra precision really gets lost in the fog anyway.