No it's not. Room temperature in tropical countries is often 26-30C.

I work in the food industry and this whole "room temperature" thing is a major bugbear for me actually because when so much food dates markings are designed around a room temperature of ~22C, it's a big health and safety issue for people (and shops, warehouses, restaurants) who don't know that and happily store the goods up to the date marking at 30C. Deciding that room temperature ~=22C and basing worldwide food safety on that is absolutely Western centric.

Obviously people here are not stupid and don't store meat etc. past when it's gone bad. But I've often bought e.g. oils from suppliers and it's clear that it's on the edge of rancidity even though it's got a year+ to go on the date because it's been stored at "room temperature".

> The US has the widest range of temperatures of any country

I assure you it does not. But I guess American Exceptionalism makes you want to believe that so go ahead.

A 5s google search suggests the country with the widest range is probably Russia.

Yes, but that the whole problem: this scale kind of suggests that you don't go below 0.

But this is not the case here, right?

Some people are used to higher temperatures and never seen snow while some people can't even imagine what it's like to have 40C (104F) outside.

0C is a great "common denominator" (irony). We all understand that generally this is when water changes its state and most people know how it feels.

And then your imagination can easily go lower or higher.

>Judging anything on a scale from 0-10 (or 0-100) is very common.

Now consider that many people live in places where 0F is warmer than what you actually have for a good part of a year.

Yeah, but you don't need a thermometer for that.

Using zero as the freezing point of water makes sense for everyday use, and using the boiling point for 100 degrees does follow fairly naturally from that - but plenty of other potential reference points could have worked equally well.

That said, for all the American claims of "fahrenheit is more human", 100 °C is the temperature of a hot sauna so works much better as "the highest temperature you'll encounter in day to day life" than 100 °F.