This is a part of a conversation in an English book in Vietnam titled Tieng Anh 6 tap 1.
Nick: Hi Mi, welcome to our house!
Elena: Come upstairs! I'll show you my room.
This is question 1: Elena's room is on the first floor. (True or false?)
The answer to this question in the teacher's book is False. I wonder if upstairs isn't on the first floor, or if it is not clear enough, so it is false.
Please note that Rover and I have made multiple fixes to post 1. Please make sure you post in the default font and font size and use line breaks so the text is easy to read. If you paste text in from somewhere else, you will have to make those changes manually before you submit your post.
My initial thought was exactly the same as Rover's - it depends on what you (or the writer) calls the first floor. In a building in the UK, you enter from the street onto the ground floor and would have to go upstairs to get to the first floor. In the US, you enter from the street onto the first floor. That would suggest that the answer would be
True in the UK and
False in the US. However, the text does not say how many flights of stairs they need to climb in order to get to Elena's room. For all we know, he room could be on the third, fifth, nineteenth floor! Knowing that they have to go "upstairs" to get to her room only tells us one thing - her room is not on the ground floor. On that basis, the answer again is
False because we do not know for certain that her room is on the first floor.
It's a shame that we don't know how the author came to that answer, but the answer is False for both main variants. To clarify:
Elena's room is on the first floor. True or false?
BrE: False. We only know it's not on the ground floor. We don't know which upstairs floor it's on.
Elena's room is on the first floor. True or false?
AmE: False. It can't be on the first floor because she has to go upstairs to get to it.
