Almost all of them will have about a foot or so above ground and little windows along the ceiling, like this:
The window for the basement apartment in my building. The top of the window is likely level with the ceiling.
and in some cases, there will even be a depression in the ground and the window will be partially below the ground level (a lot of people plant flowers in the depression by the window). Up here, almost all basements are at least partially finished. Usually, the only unfinished part will be the room with the washer/dryer, furnace, water heater, air exchange and so on. Even if there are no windows, they will still probably finish the basement and just depend on artificial light.
Some houses have cellars below the basement, or as a separate area off to one side, sometimes under the house but in my experience they're usually under the porch or just under the lawn.
There are also some houses (older ones, usually) that didn't have basements originally, but later on (during the post-war boom typically, some cases during the 1920s) the house was raised and a basement was put in underneath it, but usually houses here have basements. Victory homes, simple houses built after the war that were intended to be temporary but aren't, usually don't have basements. My grandparents live in one, and they have little more than a cellar with a furnace in it. I'm not sure what the foundation of their house is like.
Usually if you don't build a basement you have to put in pilings and pour a concrete pad on top of that, this is what we use to support big box stores and other buildings. (Our city hall has a basement for utilities, but the extension they added to the front this summer is built on pilings and concrete instead.)
Anything built directly on rock is pretty uncommon. If you look at Sudbury in Google maps you'll notice large oblong gaps in the city. Those are rock outcrops. They don't build on those (usually, in the east end they blasted them away and built a cinema and some other retail stuff). Usually, even at the tops of hills, there is about 4 feet of soil above bedrock. You just have to get below about 4 feet or so to get to the point where frost can't reach and I think it is fine at that point. It might be closer to five, our basements are pretty deep. (The house I grew up in had almost 7 foot ceilings in the basement, but the ceiling of the basement went about 30 inches above ground.)
Then there is the case of the far north, where there is permafrost. Any building with a basement would shift in summer, so they're built on stilts and "float" around on the mud. Their utilities are usually overground. Water and sewer lines require heating coils so that they don't freeze. In Ontario that is only common in far northern aboriginal communities. In Nunavut, almost every building is built that way. (The "highrises" in Iqaluit are anchored on solid rock.)
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I tried to find a photo to explain the "depression window" but I can't find it. There is basically a little rectangular area cut out of the ground by the window, it is lined with metal, and the window opens onto that like a light well to light up the basement. Here are some other photos though: (I went through 2 years worth.)
A house where the basement is finished and half above ground (that is, barely a basement at all.) I grew up in a house like this. Only the laundry room is unfinished. (Concrete floor, beams exposted and so on.)
A basement completely underground, no windows. My brother lives in a place like this, the basement is unfinished, used for utilities and storage (and "jamming").
This building has a basement with a tiny window above ground (near the back of the building, on the right side of the photo), to show how small these windows can be. Any lower and it would have the depression/light well thingy. The top of the window is very likely flush with the ceiling. (The ceiling might even raise up a bit by the window so that the light can reach down, the opposite of the light well thing.)
(explanation of that van.)
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