I'm from the city, where distances are measured in blocks. Now I'm living in the country, where the unit of measurement is acres. I don't know what the hell an acre is. I mean, sure, it's 43,560 square feet, which is roughly the size of 100 studio apartments. But I have no idea how to eyeball that. I can picture five, maybe six repeating Ikea furniture set-ups until I start to lose focus.

Part of my duties on the farm I'm living on is to mow the pastures. The other day I completed it for the first time. I did it in chunks and it took three days. I wanted to know what the actual acreage of the pastures is, but no one I asked knew.

Then I found this handy, free online tool that calculates it for you. DaftLogic's Google Maps Area Calculator Tool lets you punch up an address, then trace a feature on the map (and multiple non-adjoining features, if you'd like), and it then spits out the area in square meters, square kilometers, acres, hectares, square feet, square miles and square nautical miles, which will come in handy if your property gets flooded.

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The images above are not of the property I'm on now, by the way; I've merely used them for illustrative purposes. The actual land I'm mowing came out to be about 5.5 acres, or 550 studio apartments.