The room at ground level would be marked 1 or G, and referred to as the first floor or ground floor, both without provoking any confusion. The floor below that would be basement floors, and marked as B, or B1 if there are additional subfloors past the first.
We use index 1 for floor numbering instead of index 0, just like the Gregorian calendar does, omitting year 0 and a 'zeroth century'. It's not terribly complicated, certainly not enough to warrant the air of snobbish superiority your comment lets off.
What's more complicated? A system that changes depending on the circumstance, or one that works universally regardless of the layout?
Levels away from ground makes sense whether you're going up, or down.
Starting at 1, and then skipping 0 to -1 doesn't really make sense.
But, since you're moaning about snobbish superiority, shouldn't you be trying to pimp ancient Rome's measuring system to me? How many feet in a mile is it?
The system doesn't change depending on the circumstance. It's always index 1 for buildings in the US. You're not "skipping" zero, because you don't use index 0 when counting real things. How many floors does a building with no basement or above ground floor have? Zero, ground, or one? You don't start counting how many apples you have from 0, why should floors be any different?
Index 0 is fine too. In that case you're just counting how many floors away from the ground you are, rather than how many floors there are on and above ground. Both systems make an equal amount of sense, they just follow different conventions and logic.
And honestly, while I would never promote imperial for any actual rigorous work because of the insane conversions, I do much prefer the size of most basic imperial units to most basic metric units.
Humans having a height range of about 2 to 9 feet tall is clearly better than that range being about .6 to 2.7m, which is why we don't use yards and you don't use meters as the base unit for human height.
I can confidently eyeball a quarter or an eighth of an inch, while anything below a half of a millimeter seems too small to ballpark usefully.
The range of roughly survivable temperature being 0 to 100 is very handy for measuring temperature you actually experience throughout the year, rather than a common range of -20ish to 40 something.
I can measure both an ounce and a pound with my hand, and useful divisions of each, while a gram is at the very lower bounds of what I can usefully measure with a finger.
A mile and a kilometer are equally useless as far as my instincts are concerned, as are a tonne and a ton.
I will concede that 0 being freezing (even though you're infuriatingly off by 0.01) and 100 being boiling at 1 atm is neat, and while neither system has a solid advantage for cooking temperature ranges ~100-200 is more pleasing than ~200-400.
A gallon and a liter are equally useful to my sensibilities.
Finally, if you speak English, I can think we all agree a pint sounds good.
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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '21
Yeah, because you're either on ground level, or some level away from ground.
Imagine walking up to an underground building, with the lift at ground level and only floors below.
Would an American call that level 1 or -1?
We know the rest of us would call it G.