I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Where I live in the northern Rockies, -40°F is common enough that you kinda forget about it. But it’s also a college town. And every year we get a bunch of incoming students who treat the extreme cold like some sort of game or a challenge to their masculinity.
Same with driving. There’s a reason why the regional natives fastidiously use our turn signals and give a ton of space to cars in front of us. Because each of us has gotten into a fender bender by not doing that.
Seriously. Treat the cold with respect. It can debilitate you in just a few minutes.