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Albert Einstein

On 18th April 1955 Albert Einstein, possibly the most famous scientist of all time, died in New Jersey in the USA, aged 76. In 1999 he was described by Time magazine as the ‘Person of the Century’.

It is said that Einstein’s interest in science began at the age of five when he was given a compass as a present, and at school it was clear that his ability in mathematics was extraordinary.

The biggest of Einstein’s many scientific achievements was probably his General Theory of Relativity, published in 1916. His ideas on space, time and matter were completely new, and helped develop a lot of the technology that forms part of our modern world, such as atomic energy and – unfortunately – nuclear weapons.

Einstein worked on his scientific theories in Germany, where he was born, and in Switzerland before moving to the USA in 1933. Although he was a pacifist, in 1939 he told President Roosevelt of the USA that the country needed to make an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany – which of course it did. Later in his life, when talking about the power of modern weapons, he said: “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

He was also famous for being quite eccentric. For example, he hated wearing socks, enjoyed talking to his cat, and found it difficult to remember people’s birthdays. Also, although he spoke English very well, he said he was never able to write in the language because the spelling of English words was too difficult.

After he died, scientists decided to study Einstein’s brain. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that the part that was responsible for mathematical thought was 15% bigger than average.

Alfred Nobel and His Legacy

When Alfred Nobel was 34 years old, he invented dynamite and 22 years later, smokeless gunpowder. These are hardly things one would associate with a name that has become synonymous with peace. However, peace is the subject of just one of the six prizes that are awarded each year in the name of the Swedish chemist. The other prizes are for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a Norwegian committee, while the other five prizes are awarded by Swedish committees. The reason behind this has never been clear. One argument suggests that the Norwegians had shown a special interest in mediation, arbitration and the peaceful solution of international disputes, and was therefore the natural choice.

The Nobel Peace Prize has existed for 104 years, and within that time about 70 of the individual winners have been men and about 17 of the individual winners have been women. The first woman to win the prize was Nobel's friend Bertha von Sutter exactly 100 years ago, in 1905, and the most recent was Wangari Maathai in 2004 for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace. The other Nobel prizes can only be awarded to individuals (up to a maximum of three), but the Nobel Peace Prize can be given to institutions and organizations as well as individuals.

This year's prize was awarded jointly to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way. The ceremony will take place, as usual, on December 10th at the City Hall, Oslo, Norway.

Australia

Australia lies between the Indian and the South Pacific oceans, south of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The nearest country to the east of Australia is New Zealand. Because it is south of the equator, the seasons in Australia are the opposite of those in Europe and North America: it’s winter in Australia when it’s summer in Europe, and vice versa.

Australia is the sixth largest country in the world after Russia, Canada, China, the USA and Brazil, but only has a population of about 20.5 million – this means there are 51 countries in the world that have more people than Australia.

As well as being the smallest of the world’s continents, it is also the flattest (there aren’t many big mountains, and the highest of them is not much more than 2000m) and the driest (the middle of Australia has less rain than almost any other part of the world).

Australia is well known for having a lot of unusual animals, like the kangaroo and koala bear. In fact, 80% of Australia’s mammals and 45% of its birds do not live in any other part of the world.

The native Australian people, often called ‘Aborigines’, had probably been living on the continent for more than 40,000 years before the British arrived in the late 18th century (they first landed on 29th April 1770). There were probably about 350,000 Aborigines when the British arrived, but their population fell over the following 150 years. Now, however, it is rising again, and is now about 400,000.

There has been a lot of immigration into Australia in the last 80 years – so much, in fact, that the total population is now four times bigger than it was in 1918 – and more than 25 per cent of the people now living there were born in another country. Among the Australians who were born in other countries, the five largest groups are those from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy, Vietnam and China.

Beethoven

Most people who like classical music would say that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was one of the greatest composers in history. He was born in Bonn, Germany but spent most of his life in Vienna, the capital of Austria.

His father, a musician in Bonn, encouraged him to play and compose music from an early age. The young Beethoven showed clear signs of being a musical genius, giving a public piano performance at the age of eight and then publishing his first musical composition when he was twelve.

One of the most well-known facts about Beethoven is that he started losing his hearing in his late twenties, and later became completely deaf. Amazingly, however, this did not stop him composing.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most composers worked for the Church or for royal courts, but Beethoven was a freelancer who sold his music to publishers and also received money for playing the piano in public concerts. As a young man he often had money problems, which became worse when his deafness stopped him playing the piano, but later in his life, after becoming very famous, he received financial support from wealthy aristocrats.

Beethoven also suffered from depression, caused partly by his increasing deafness and partly by problems in his personal life – for example he wasn’t able to marry the woman he loved because she was already married with children. In his thirties he almost committed suicide, but after choosing not to end his life he began working harder than ever, producing wonderful pieces of music such as his Eroica symphony.

Beethoven had strong political beliefs. He supported the democratic ideals of the French Revolution (1789) and dedicated the Eroica to Napoleon Bonaparte, the leader of France, because it seemed he too supported those ideals.

Japan

Japan is a country in East Asia with a population of around 128 million. It consists of over 3,000 islands, with most of the population living on the four biggest ones: Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku.

The capital of Japan is Tokyo, a huge city on Honshu. Tokyo and its neighbouring cities have a total population of over 30 million, making them the most populous urban area in the world.

Japan’s ‘economic miracle’ in the second half of the 20th century led to fast economic growth and a great increase in prosperity. Despite a long recession in recent years, its GDP (Gross Domestic Product – a measurement of the size of a country’s economy) is still the second biggest in the world after the United States.

Prosperity and a healthy diet are two of the reasons why Japan has a higher life expectancy than almost any other country in the world. However, most experts say the Japanese population will soon begin to decrease because couples are having fewer children than they used to.

Forest and mountains, including around 200 volcanoes, cover a lot of Japan. The country’s position on a ‘fault line’ on the Earth’s surface means that earthquakes happen occasionally – the last very serious one took place in 1995 near the city of Kobe.

Japan is well known for having very advanced technology, and most people would say robots are among the country’s most amazing products. One of the most recent is the Asimo robot, which is white, 1.3 metres high, and the same shape as a human – and therefore looks like a small astronaut. It can walk like a human, dance, and recognize and answer 50 different questions!

John Lennon

John Lennon died on 8th December 1980 when Mark Chapman, a mentally ill man who called himself a ‘fan’ of the ex-Beatle, shot him at the entrance to the building where Lennon lived in New York. The news of Lennon’s death caused great sadness around the world.

The main reason for Lennon’s popularity was, of course, his work with the Beatles in the 1960s. As well as being a singer and guitarist, he was a gifted songwriter who wrote most of the Beatles’ lyrics in partnership with Paul McCartney. Lennon and McCartney also wrote some songs individually – Lennon’s included Day in the Life and Come Together.

In the 1950s, as a teenager in Liverpool in the north-west of England, Lennon was a big fan of American rock ’n’ roll music. His aunt bought him a guitar, but then began to worry that he was spending too much time playing it. She said, ‘The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it.’

In 1957, aged sixteen, Lennon decided to form a band called The Quarrymen, and invited Paul McCartney to join him. George Harrison was the next to join. Pete Best, the drummer, was the fourth member of the band before Ringo Starr replaced him. The band changed its name to the Silver Beetles, then to the Beatles. Worldwide fame was just around the corner.

When the Beatles split up in 1970, John began a solo career. By then he was married to his second wife, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono. He and Ono became campaigners for world peace (the Vietnam war was still going on), and also supported new ideas such as feminism. Some people thought Lennon’s ideas were naïve, but others admired him for using his fame to highlight important issues.

Lennon’s beliefs also led him to write two of his most popular songs: Imagine and Happy Xmas (War is Over). Imagine has become extremely well-known, and in December 2005 it was the song people played at almost all the events that took place to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Lennon’s death.

Mel Gibson

Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson was born on January 3rd, 1956, in Peekskill, New York, USA. He was the sixth child out of eleven children born to Hutton and Ann Gibson. When Mel was twelve, he and his family moved to Australia.

He got his first film role in 1977, when he was twenty-one. He then had great success in Australia with Mad Max in 1979 and Gallipoli in 1981. Mel met and married his wife Robyn in 1980. Their first child, a daughter who they named Hannah, was born in the same year. From then until now, Mel and Robyn have had six more children, all sons.

In 1984 Mel went to Hollywood to make his first film, The Bounty, in which he played Fletcher Christian. It was a remake of the classic Mutiny on the Bounty, but it wasn’t very successful. In 1987 Mel played the part of Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon. The film was a blockbuster and established Mel as a star. The film was so popular that, in the following year (1988), Bruce Willis played another ‘crazy cop’, John McClane, in the first of the Die Hard films.

In 1993, Mel starred in The Man Without a Face. It was also his first film as director. He has directed two other famous films: Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ. In Braveheart Mel played the role of the Scottish hero William Wallace. He won two Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2004 he wrote, directed and produced The Passion of the Christ. He put $25 million of his own money into the film, but in 2004 alone he earned more than $210 million for the film. His production company, Icon Productions, has made eleven films and has three more which will come out in the next two years.

The future looks good for Mr Gibson. On June 7th 2005, Mel and wife Robyn celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Perhaps the next celebration after that will be the wedding of their daughter Hannah, who has recently got engaged.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland on October 16th, 1854. He attended Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Classics. In 1875, at the age of twenty-one, his first poem was published. He spent the next few years studying, writing and travelling. Between 1882 and 1883, he lectured in the United States, France and England and in 1884 he married Constance Lloyd in London.

Two years after his marriage, he ‘began that course of conduct which was to lead to his downfall in 1895’. The ‘conduct’ referred to was his openly homosexual lifestyle which, at the time, was regarded as unacceptable.

In 1890, the literary world sat up and took notice of Wilde as a serious writer when he published The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Critic as Artist. This was the start of a very productive five years of writing for Wilde, during which time he became both famous and rich.

However, in 1891 he had met a good-looking young man named Lord Alfred Douglas. This man would lead him to his spectacular downfall within four years. The Marquess of Queensbury suspected the friendship between Wilde and Douglas of being ‘improper’ and publicly insulted Wilde on more than one occasion.

On March 2nd, 1895, Queensbury was arrested after Wilde complained of criminal libel. The case went to court but collapsed after it was revealed that Queensbury’s comments were not lies but the truth. Wilde was immediately arrested for ‘committing indecent acts with other male persons’. He was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison with hard labour.

For a man who had always relied on his intellect rather than his athleticism, his time in prison hit him particularly hard. On his release, in 1897, he went to live in France but, poor and broken by his experience, died three years later, in 1900.

Ronaldinho

You’ve probably never heard of Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, even though he is one of the most famous sportsmen in the world. That’s because almost everyone knows him by his nickname, which means ‘little Ronald’ in his native Portuguese.

His face is familiar to billions of people because of his achievements on the pitch, his big front teeth and almost permanent grin, and also the large number of TV adverts he has appeared in. It’s also difficult to find a football-related computer game that doesn’t have his picture somewhere on the packaging. The sportsman we are talking about is, of course, the 26-year-old Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho.

Everyone who enjoys football would agree that he is one of the most entertaining players in the world, often showing skills that even opposition fans applaud. He has been playing for Barcelona since 2003 and for Brazil since 1999, and has scored many memorable and important goals for both teams.

Born in the city of Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil, his football skills were obvious from a young age. When he was eight he started playing at junior level for Gremio, a club in Porto Alegre, and at thirteen he scored 23 goals in one match! The media began to realize how special he was when he reached the Gremio senior team, and by 2001, when he moved to France to play for Paris St Germain, he was already one of the most well-known young footballers in the world. Though he played very well for Brazil in the 2002 World Cup, he was not so successful in Paris – his manager said he was more interested in nightlife than in matches. After he moved to Barcelona, however, his performances were so good that no one worried about his continued enjoyment of nightclubs.

Ronaldinho’s goals were one of the main reasons why Barcelona won the Champions’ League, the most prestigious football competition in the world, in 2006. As he himself says, ‘God gives gifts to everyone ... Some can write, some can dance. He gave me the skill to play football and I am making the most of it.”

Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg is probably the most famous film director in the world. He was born in 1946, he grew up in the state of Arizona in the western United States and showed a passion for film-making from a very young age. He made a nine-minute film about cowboys when he was only eleven, and at sixteen persuaded his local cinema to show a 140-minute science fiction adventure that he had written and directed.

In his early twenties he worked mostly on TV programmes and short films, before moving on to longer productions. The film that made him famous was Jaws (1975), in which a man-eating shark terrorises the population of a small coastal town in the United States. One of the most memorable things about the film was the way the camera-work and music created almost unbearable tension whenever the shark was about to attack.

A couple of years later Spielberg directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which UFOs appear in the sky over the United States and then friendly aliens arrive in a huge spaceship. He continued with the subject of friendly aliens in ET (1982), which was particularly popular with children and teenagers. Both these productions were influential in their use of special effects.

The first of his major successes in the 1990s was Jurassic Park (1993), in which dinosaurs return to Earth. Soon after came Schindler’s List (1993), a moving film about the Holocaust, and a few years later he directed another film about events during the Second World War, Saving Private Ryan (1998), famous for its realistic recreation of battles involving American soldiers in France in 1944.

The many awards Spielberg has received during his career include two Oscars for best director. Now aged 60, he still seems to have a knack for making films that are popular with the public, such as War of the Worlds (2005) starring Tom Cruise.

The Beatles

In 2005, thirty-five years after they broke up, The Beatles were named by Variety magazine as the most iconic entertainers of the 20th century. Not a bad achievement for four working class boys from Liverpool, England.

Paul McCartney met John Lennon in 1957 at a garden fete where John Lennon was playing with his band. After talking they decided to play together and became The Quarrymen. George Harrison, who was a friend of Paul McCartney, joined the band in 1958 and they changed their name to The Silver Beetles.

They changed their name once more in 1960 and became The Beatles. They travelled to Hamburg, Germany, where they developed their musical skills and came back to the UK as experienced performers, where they quickly became stars.

Their manager Brian Epstein worked hard to get them a recording contract, but it wasn’t an easy task. They had a lot of different drummers until 1962, when Ringo Starr joined the band. The final line up was John Lennon and George Harrison on vocals and guitars, Paul McCartney on vocals and bass, and Ringo Starr on drums.

Finally, after being rejected by almost every other label, the recording company EMI agreed to try them out. They recorded their first single Love Me Do at Abbey Road Studios in London and within a year ‘Beatlemania’ had taken hold of Britain.

They released their first US single I Wanna Hold Your Hand in 1964 and the United States, too, was instantly gripped by ‘Beatlemania’. By the following year, they had become the most famous band in the world.

Over the next five years they produced songs of all different styles, from ballads to anthems and from blues to heavy metal. After their split in 1970 the band members went their different ways and each enjoyed some solo success, but never matched the popularity they had known as The Beatles.

The Bicycle

You might be surprised to know that bicycles have existed for less than two hundred years. No one is sure who invented this popular two-wheeled machine, but it was probably either the German Karl von Drais, in 1817, or the American W K Clarkson, in 1819.

The early models didn’t look much like the bicycles of today. The front wheel was much bigger than the back one, and also there weren’t any pedals – riders had to move themselves forward by pushing their feet against the ground.

Pedals finally arrived in the 1840s, and in 1879 an Englishman named Henry Lawson had the idea of connecting them to the back wheel with a chain. Gears, which made things much easier for those cycling uphill, first appeared in the 1890s.

There are now approximately one billion bicycles in the world – more than twice the total number of cars – and they are the main form of transport in some developing countries. They have to compete with cars on the streets of all the world’s cities, and the two forms of transport don’t always mix well. In London in 2005, for example, over 300 cyclists were either killed or seriously injured in accidents involving cars. Even though bicycles are much more environmentally friendly than cars, most governments don’t do much to encourage people to ride rather than drive. In China, which is famous for having a huge number of bicycles (about 200 million), the authorities in the city of Shanghai even banned cycling for a while in 2003.

Cycling is on the rise is the United Kingdom, and the number of annual journeys made by bike in London has increased 50% over the last five years. Experts say there is a mixture of reasons for this boom: concerns about the environment, the desire to keep fit, and also the fact that cycling is often not only cheaper but also quicker than travelling by car.

Wales

Wales is a small country that borders the west side of central England. It has a population of slightly less than 3 million. The capital of Wales is Cardiff, which has a population of about 300,000. Along with England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales is one of the four countries in the United Kingdom. It has its own parliament in Cardiff, but it is not completely independent.

The Welsh language is one of the oldest in Europe, and is very different from English. All Welsh people can speak English, but about 20% of them can also speak Welsh.

There are a lot of mountains in Wales. The highest is Snowdon (1,085m).

The red, white and blue flag of the United Kingdom is a mixture of flags representing England and Scotland but not Wales. The Welsh flag has a red dragon on a background that is half white and half green. The dragon has been a symbol of Wales for more than a thousand years.

The two other symbols of Wales are the daffodil and the leek. The daffodil is a yellow flower that appears in spring, and some Welsh people attach one to their coat on Welsh national day (St David’s Day), which is 1st March. The leek has been a Welsh symbol since the seventh century, when the Welsh king told his soldiers to attach leeks to their helmets so they could identify each other.

The most popular sports in Wales are football and rugby. Many Welsh people are very passionate about rugby, and are very happy when their national team beats England!

Wales has a strong musical tradition. Most towns in the south of the country have at least one local choir, Welsh rugby crowds are famous for their singing, and in recent years the country has produced successful pop groups such as the Manic Street Preachers and Stereophonics.

Beckham

David Robert Joseph Beckham was born in Leytonstone, London on May 2nd, 1975. Keen on football from very early on, David won the Bobby Charlton Soccer Skills Award when he was 11. Five years later, at the age of 16, he signed on as a trainee at Manchester United Football Club. The following year, he made his first team debut as a substitute but it was another three years before he started playing full-time in the Premier League. He established himself as a quality player in the 1995/96 season. In 1996 he started playing for the England senior team and the year ended with him being voted Young Player of the Year.

He was left out of the team for the first two matches of the World Cup, but in the match against Colombia he scored a stunning free kick and became the hero of England. However, in the next match, against Argentina, Beckham was sent off for a childish foul on Diego Simeone. England lost the match and went out of the World Cup. Everyone blamed Beckham and the newspapers wouldn’t leave him alone. Many predicted that his career was over – the fans hated him, the newspapers hated him and even people who didn’t know him hated him. Despite all the odds, he answered his critics by playing better football and keeping his temper under control. Gradually, the fans started to appreciate him once more.

In 2001, he was made captain of the England team, a responsibility which brought out the best in him. During the matches, he led by example and showed that he could play with all his heart. In March 2002 he broke his foot playing for Manchester United against Deportivo La Coruna. There was chaos when England thought they had lost their captain but it now seems highly likely that his foot will have healed by the time his team have their first match in Japan.

Brad Pitt

The American actor Brad Pitt probably makes a lot of other men envious, not least because he earns thousands of dollars for a day’s work and is always in celebrity magazines’ lists of ‘the world’s most beautiful people’.

Pitt was born in the state of Oklahoma in 1963, and was interested in films from an early age. At high school, in the state of Missouri, his other hobbies included golf, tennis and swimming. He began studying journalism at university, but dropped out when he decided he wanted to try to become a professional actor.

After some minor roles in various Hollywood films, Pitt became famous in the mid-1990s by playing a police detective in the crime thriller Seven and a psychiatric patient in the science-fiction film Twelve Monkeys. Since then he’s been in one successful film after another, including Fight Club (one of a number of films in which he plays unconventional, slightly dangerous characters), Ocean’s Eleven (about a gang of thieves who plan to steal money from Las Vegas casinos), and Troy (in which he plays Achilles, a hero from Ancient Greek mythology).

Over the years there has been a lot of media interest in Pitt’s personal life, particularly his relationships with glamorous actresses. In 2000 he married Jennifer Aniston, star of the hit US sitcom Friends, but they split up in 2005 and soon after he started dating Angelina Jolie, who he had met when acting alongside her in the film Mr and Mrs Smith.

Indeed, Pitt is known for his generosity in supporting various good causes, including environmental campaigns and efforts to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa. He also gave millions of dollars to help reconstruct New Orleans, where he and Jolie spend a lot of their time, after the city was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812-70) is widely considered to be one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language. His novels provide a vivid description of life in nineteenth-century England, and tell wonderfully engaging stories that are full of memorable characters. Many of the people in his books have exaggerated characteristics, often being either extremely benevolent or extremely unpleasant, and some of his most famous works are ‘morality tales’ in which good people end up being rewarded and bad people punished. All his stories make the reader desperate to know what happens next, and during his lifetime most of his novels came out in separate weekly or monthly parts, so people had to wait patiently for the next instalment.

Another feature of Dickens’ work is his social conscience, particularly his awareness of the poverty and bad working conditions suffered by the urban working-class population of nineteenth-century England. At a time when Britain was the world’s richest and most powerful country, he focused on the people who didn’t seem to be receiving any of the benefits.

In his twenties Dickens started a career as a political journalist, and his special talent for storytelling soon became obvious. In his spare time he started to do other kinds of writing, including his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which became a great success as soon as it was published in 1836-7.

Over the next twenty-five years he wrote masterpieces such as David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist. Oliver Twist is the story of a kind-hearted young orphan who gets tricked into joining a gang of pickpockets on the streets of London before eventually being rescued from his life of crime. In the 1960s it was made into a much-loved musical, first for the theatre and then later as a film.

Cross-Channel Relations

Given that they are separated only by a narrow strip of water in the form of the English Channel, it is natural that the English and the French have a close relationship. Unfortunately it hasn’t always been a happy one, as a lot of blood has been spilt in countless Anglo-French wars over the centuries, but at least these days the battles are only of the political and sporting kind.

The historical Anglo-French rivalry has contributed to a tradition of criticizing and making jokes about each other’s way of life. For example, the French tend to enjoy criticizing English cuisine, which they have traditionally regarded with a mixture of pity and contempt. They even have a nickname for the English les rosbifs which is based on the idea that English cooks are incapable of preparing anything more imaginative than roast beef.

Meanwhile, some English people refer to the French as “Frogs” (because the French eat frogs’ legs, which the English aren’t so keen on), and also allege that although the French have an international reputation for being romantic and stylish (some of the world’s biggest fashion designers come from France), these qualities are not as important as those the English often like to attribute to themselves such as pragmatism and stoicism.

Beneath the jokes and the stereotypes, however, the tourism statistics show that France is the most popular holiday destination among British people, while the United Kingdom is the second most popular destination for the French. Furthermore, around 100,000 British people now live in France (an increase of more than 50% in the last five years), while around 300,000 French are resident in the UK (the majority are young professionals working in London).

Halloween

On the night of October 31st you can find Halloween parties in various different parts of the world, but it is probably true to say that the Halloween tradition is strongest in the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland.

Anyone who has ever been to a Halloween fancy-dress party will know that witches, ghosts and other scary creatures are the most popular costumes. To understand the reason for this we must go back more than 2,000 years to the pre-Christian religious festivals of the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland. From what we know of the Celts, it seems part of their religious calendar was a night at the beginning of winter when they believed the spirits of dead people could return to walk the earth. On this night some Celtic tribes lit bonfires to scare away evil spirits, or even disguised themselves as ghosts so that the real ghosts would not attack them. The event survived into the Christian era, and eventually received the name of Halloween and a fixed date in the modern calendar – 31st October.

In the nineteenth century, Irish and British (particularly Scottish) people who emigrated to North America took their Halloween tradition with them, and in the twentieth century it spread all over the US and Canada. Nowadays in the US, for example, people spend more on decorations and parties during Halloween than during any other annual festival apart from Christmas.

One of the most well-known Halloween decorations is a hollow pumpkin, usually with a candle inside, and a mouth and eyes cut into the skin to make a scary-looking ‘face’. As for Halloween activities, one of the most traditional is ‘trick or treating’ in which children and teenagers – sometimes dressed as ghosts or witches, or in some other Halloween costume – go around knocking on people’s doors on the evening of October 31st and asking for small ‘treats’, usually sweets.

Harry Potter

In 1990, a British woman in her mid-twenties called Joanne Rowling was on a train in England when she suddenly had an idea for a story she could write. She had enjoyed writing ever since she was a young girl, but there was something about the main character in this story that seemed especially exciting. He was a thin, black-haired boy who wore glasses. He was also a wizard, but didn’t yet know about his magical powers. His name was Harry Potter.

Harry has since made Rowling the richest author in the world. Her six books about his adventures have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide and exist in more than 50 different languages. Most of the readers are children or young teenagers, but the books are unusual in the way that they also appeal to adults.

Each of the six books covers about a year in Harry’s life as he grows from a boy into a teenager. At the start of the first book we learn that he is an orphan who lives with his horrible aunt and uncle, the Dursleys. On his eleventh birthday he discovers he is a wizard, and soon afterwards goes off to study at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which is where most of the action in the six books takes place.

The stories are full of things that appeal to imagination of readers of all ages. One of them is the game of ‘Quidditch’, which Harry is very good at. It is a bit like football, although it takes place in the sky and the players ride on broomsticks!

Rowling has said that the seventh Harry Potter book, which comes out in July this year, will be the last. The sixth book sold almost 7 million copies worldwide in the first 24 hours after publication, a world record, but the seventh will almost certainly be even more popular.

Leonardo DiCaprio

DiCaprio was named after Leonardo da Vinci, because his pregnant mother was looking at a painting by the great Italian artist when she first felt her baby kick. He was born in Los Angeles in 1974, and – perhaps as a sign of things to come – spent most of his childhood living not far from Hollywood.

He had an interest in acting from an early age, and by the time he was sixteen he had appeared in various TV soap operas and commercials. He didn’t have to wait long to make the jump to cinema, impressing critics at the age of nineteen by playing a mentally disabled boy in a film called What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). In 1996 he played Romeo in a successful film version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Then, in 1997 came the blockbuster Titanic in which he played the part of Jack Dawson, a likeable but poor young man who falls in love with a rich young woman (Winslet), but then dies when the ship hits an iceberg and sinks. The film turned DiCaprio into a celebrity pin-up, regularly appearing on magazine covers and featuring in lists of ‘the world’s most handsome men’. Since Titanic, DiCaprio has been in a number of other successful films, including The Beach, Gangs of New York, and The Departed. DiCaprio is good friends with many other film stars, including Ben Affleck and Cameron Diaz.

DiCaprio is very interested in environmental issues, and earlier this year helped to make a documentary about global warming called The 11th Hour. His efforts to lead a green lifestyle include travelling by normal passenger aircraft rather than private jet, driving a hybrid car (one that is not powered only by petrol) and putting solar panels on his house in Los Angeles.

Life on Mars

Have you ever looked up at the stars on a clear night and wondered if humans and the other living things on this planet can really be ‘alone’ in the universe? We now know there are millions of other galaxies, so it is easy to believe there is life out there somewhere.

The idea of strange creatures living on other planets has recurred throughout the history of science fiction, and lots of books and films have imagined these aliens coming to Earth. Sometimes the extraterrestrials are friendly, as in the film ET (1982), but more often they are hostile, as in the film Independence Day (1996).

There is one place in particular that the creators of science fiction have often imagined as the base for alien invaders, and in comparison with other galaxies it is very close. It orbits the sun, just like Earth, and sometimes it is only about 56 million kilometres away from us. It can often be seen easily with the naked eye. It is, of course, the planet Mars.

The main reason Mars has played a major role in science fiction is probably because out of all the planets in our solar system its climate and atmosphere are the most similar to those here on Earth, and therefore it seems the most likely to be capable of supporting life. Its reddish colour, which can make it look mysterious or even slightly threatening, has also fed the imaginations of science-fiction writers.

One of the most famous books about hostile Martians attacking Earth is War of the Worlds (1898) by the English writer HG Wells. There have been two film versions of the story – the first was made in the 1950s and the second, starring Tom Cruise, in 2005.

In the last forty years the United States, the Soviet Union (later Russia), Europe and Japan have all sent spacecraft to orbit Mars, and a small number of these craft have landed on the planet. However, they certainly haven’t found any Martians.

Mark Twain

You probably know me as Mark Twain, but I was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30th, 1835 in the state of Missouri, U.S.A. I started working at the age of 13 as an apprentice to a printer. A little later on, I worked as a journalist, writing short pieces for my brother’s newspaper. But the river was my true love and, at the age of 23, I got my pilot’s licence. Finally, I was a steamboat captain! I spent a few years doing the job I loved so much until, in 1861, the Civil War started. Steamboat traffic was halted and I lost my job.

I went back to my career in journalism and enjoyed some success writing humorous travel letters for a newspaper in Virginia. I signed these letters with the name Mark Twain – even that was a joke – Mark Twain was actually a boatman’s call. When I worked as a captain on the Mississippi the leadsman would call out Mark Twain to tell me when the water was the minimum for safe navigation. I decided to use the name in all my writing work for the next 50 years.

I moved to San Francisco at the age of 30 and I arranged to be a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California aboard the ship Quaker City. I married my dear wife Olivia when I was 35. We settled down in Connecticut where I wrote and Olivia brought up our girls. This time was certainly good for my writing; I wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1881), The Price and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

The 1890s were not so good though. I lost nearly all my money on some bad investments and was forced to sell my house. We even had to leave the United States for a while. We moved to Europe and lived in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy over the next five years. In April 1910 I died.

Mount Everest

Mount Everest, in Nepal, is the highest mountain on Earth. Its peak is 8,847 metres above sea level, and the first people ever to reach it were Edmund Hillary (from New Zealand) and Tenzing Norgay (from Nepal), who arrived at 11.30 am on 29th May 1953. Many mountaineers before them had failed to climb the mountain, and some had even died trying.

Hillary and Tenzing Norgay hugged each other with relief and happiness when they reached the summit, and then took some photographs. The view was incredible: the two men could see for at least a hundred miles in every direction. However, they only stayed at the top for fifteen minutes because they were running out of oxygen – they started to head back down after Tenzing Norgay, a Buddhist, had buried some sweets and biscuits in the snow as an offering to the gods. The climb to the summit from the camp at the bottom of the mountain had taken seven weeks, but the return journey, although also dangerous, took only three days.

Hillary and Tenzing were part of a large team of climbers, but the others did not try to get all the way to the peak: instead they waited in a camp a few hundred metres down. In the opinion of the leader of the team, John Hunt, there were four reasons why Hillary and Tenzing were successful: good advice from other mountaineers who had made the attempt before them, excellent planning, modern oxygen equipment, and good luck with the weather.

In the 53 years since Hillary and Tenzing’s achievement, more than 2,000 other mountaineers have managed to climb Everest. Most have done it in spring, when the weather is better. The first woman to reach the top was Junko Tabei in 1975, while the youngest person to climb the mountain was a fifteen-year-old Nepalese girl, Temba Tsheri, in 2001.

St. Patrick’s Day

On March 17th, Irish people all over the world celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Although this day is a religious and national holiday for the patron saint of Ireland, it has become a popular festival for many more people than the Irish alone. It is said that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, and the world turns green on the 17th. This is particularly true in many of the larger cities in the USA; the river in Chicago is dyed green for the day and partygoers enjoy drinking green beer.

Separating fact and fiction in the life of St. Patrick is difficult. He is believed to have been born around 390AD in Wales. When he was 16, he was captured and taken to Ireland to be a slave. During the six years he spent as a slave, he found God and became a committed Christian. After managing to escape from Ireland and captivity, he first travelled to France, then further into Europe and probably beyond.

Little is known of exactly where he went during his years of travelling but some years later he returned to Ireland as a bishop, sent by Pope Celestine. From this moment on, he helped to convert many thousands of pagan Irish to Christianity.

Many of the myths and legends surrounding the man have been added to his achievements over the years, giving us the impression that St. Patrick was a latter-day superhero. The truth, as always, is less alluring. It is claimed he chased all the snakes out of Ireland. However, there have never been snakes in Ireland, so the image of the snake is most probably a substitute for paganism and evil.

He is also famous for having used the shamrock, the three-leaved plant and symbol of Ireland, to explain the Holy Trinity (of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in one God) to his followers.

Text and E-mail Language

It seems that electronic forms of communication like text messaging on mobile phones and email have created a new kind of language. People often like to communicate as quickly as possible when they are texting or emailing, and have therefore invented lots of abbreviations or ‘text speak’ that they use instead of complete words. In many countries text speak has divided the generations: under-20s are very good at using it, while over-50s often find it difficult to understand! In English, the most common examples of text language include the use of the number ‘2’ for ‘to’ or ‘too’, ‘4’ instead of ‘for’, ‘u’ for ‘you’ and ‘c’ instead of ‘see’.

While some people think text language is good way of saving time, others think it is lazy and that it has a bad effect on language. Some studies suggest that Standard English is already changing because of text and email language. One study has even suggested that ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ could disappear from the English language during the 21st century because so many people now use ‘hey’ or even ‘yo’ at the start of texts and informal emails, and ‘laters’ at the end.

A couple of years ago a mobile phone company in Britain began a service in which it sent text messages summarising books that young people were studying at school. The idea was to turn famous works of literature into text speak, so it would be easy for young people to understand what the books were about. Of course not everyone liked the idea of characters from Shakespeare speaking in text language, and it is certainly true that the famous ‘To be or not to be?’ speech from Hamlet loses something when it begins with ‘2b?Ntb’.

Thailand

Thailand is a country in Southeast Asia. It shares a border with Burma, Malaysia, Laos and Cambodia, and its population is about 65 million – 5 million more than that of the UK. The head of state is King Bhumibol, who has been on the throne since 1946 – longer than any other monarch in the world. Most Thais are Buddhists, and monks wearing bright orange robes are probably one of the most famous images of the country.

The capital, Bangkok, is one of the biggest cities in Asia. It is growing very quickly, with lots of people from rural areas moving to the city in search of work, and, like most big cities in the developing world, it has problems such as pollution and traffic jams.

Thailand is a very beautiful country, with forests in the north and a lot of small islands that are very popular with tourists, particularly European and North American backpackers. Foreigners who visit the forests usually like to go trekking or take rides on elephants, while those who visit the islands usually want to relax in the sun and swim in the warm sea. The film The Beach (2000), with Leonardo DiCaprio, is a story about young backpackers in Thailand.

Unfortunately, Thailand was one of the countries that suffered very badly as a result of the tsunami caused by an earthquake under the Indian Ocean on 26th December 2004. The tsunami hit the west coast, killing more than 10,000 people. Obviously there were very serious consequences for the tourism and fishing industries, but fortunately the Thai government and the international community have funded a lot of rebuilding work.

It is difficult for tourists to visit Thailand without getting a taste for the delicious local food. Thai food is spicy, containing chilli and also other strong flavours such as lemon grass and coconut.

The English Language

The English language could perhaps be compared to a type of food made from various different ingredients. The first ingredient was Old English, a mixture of the languages spoken by tribes from what is now Germany and Denmark, who settled in Britain in the fifth century AD. The next important addition was the language of the Vikings, who invaded parts of Britain from Scandinavia in the eighth and ninth centuries. This was followed by the Old French of the Normans, who arrived in Britain from northern France in the 11th century.

English is an ‘open’ language that has continuously incorporated foreign words, not only from Latin and Greek but also from many modern languages. The historical connections between Britain and India, for example, have led to the inclusion of many words derived from Hindi, such as ‘pyjamas’ and ‘bungalow’.

English has become the main language of international communication, as well as being the native language of between 350 and 400 million of the world’s 6.6 billion people. Although Mandarin Chinese and Spanish both have more native speakers, English is certainly the world’s most popular language if the numbers of native and non-native speakers are added together.

There are, of course, various small differences between the English used by native speakers in different parts of the world. Also, the fact that English is an international language means there are countless different accents, none of which is officially ‘better’ than any other. It is true that for most of the 20th century the form of British English pronunciation often known as ‘BBC English’ (or, more formally, as ‘received pronunciation’) was widely admired both in Britain and elsewhere, but now the situation seems to be changing.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born on April 23rd, 1564 in Stratfordupon-Avon to John Shakespeare, a glove maker and a local justice of the peace, and Mary Arden. He was the third of eight children and the eldest boy in the family. He probably left school at 14, and later may have worked as a school teacher. He was only 18 when he met his wife-to-be, Anne Hathaway. She was 26 at the time. They were married shortly afterwards in November 1582 and their first child, Susanna, was born eight months later. Two years later, they had twins, Hamnet and Judith.

From this point in his life, all records are lost for seven years until 1592, when he is to be found living apart from his wife in London. He had become a writer and leading actor in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men acting company at the Globe Theatre.

Shakespeare was a successful man: his plays were popular with all levels of society. Eventually he made enough money to buy the Globe and, later, the Blackfriars Theatre. Some claim that he did not, in fact, write the plays he is so famous for, attributing them to John Webster, a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. However, there is little evidence for this.

William Shakespeare died in 1616 on his birthday. He was 52 years old. He is now considered to be the greatest writer in the English language. The names of his most famous plays – Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth – are known all around the world and hundreds of the phrases which he wrote have become part of everyday English: to have seen better days, to be true to yourself, the world’s your oyster, to smell a rat, brevity is the soul of wit, … Do you know any more Shakespearean quotations?

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Born in Austria in 1947, Schwarzenegger discovered bodybuilding as a teenager when his soccer coach made the team do some weight training. Arnold realized he preferred lifting weights to kicking a ball, and soon he was hooked. He even started breaking into his local gym at the weekends, when it was closed, so that he could do extra training.

Arnold won his first important bodybuilding competition in 1965, aged eighteen. He was already incredibly muscular, and two years later, aged only twenty, he won the biggest international competition for adult men, ‘Mister Universe’. He moved to the United States in 1968, even though he had very little money and spoke very little English, and over the next fifteen years he won many more international competitions.

In the late 1960s he was already dreaming about becoming a Hollywood star, but his first film didn’t go very well: his Austrian accent was so strong that many people couldn’t understand what he was saying. Eventually, however, Arnold’s body made him famous when he starred in Pumping Iron, a 1977 documentary about the world of professional bodybuilders.

His first big Hollywood film was Conan the Barbarian (1982), and perhaps his most famous was The Terminator (1984). Arnold played heroes in most of his films, but in The Terminator he played the part of an android baddie who spoke some of the most famous words from any Hollywood action movie: ‘I’ll be back…’

Schwarzenegger is extremely rich, having a fortune of about US$800m. However, unlike most Hollywood stars, he made a lot of money before his film career, mostly from a business selling bodybuilding equipment.

His first contact with American politics came in the early 1990s when he worked for the government of President Bush, travelling around the United States promoting physical fitness for children. He soon became interested in running for office himself, and in October 2003 won an election to become governor of the state of California.

Autumn

In the countries of the northern hemisphere (apart from those close to the equator), October is a month in which it is difficult to ignore the arrival of autumn, and this change in the seasons affects people in different ways.

Those who love summer never welcome the shorter days and the lower temperatures. They might become slightly melancholy when they see the flowers of summer disappearing and the leaves falling from the trees. In most cases this is just a passing feeling, but some people are more seriously affected. Sufferers from a condition called seasonal affective disorder, for example, can easily become depressed when the amount of daylight decreases. The condition (which has the very appropriate acronym SAD) is often treated by ‘light therapy’, which means using a special lamp indoors during the winter months to simulate daylight.

Knowing that winter is just around the corner means there is sometimes also a touch of melancholy about the harvest festivals that are traditional autumn events in many countries. These events give thanks for the crops that have grown in the fields during the summer months, and which are ready to be harvested in autumn. One of the most well-known examples is Thanksgiving in the United States, a one-day holiday that takes place on the fourth Thursday in November.

Some people, of course, find that autumn is their favourite season, maybe because they love the freshness of the air after the heat of summer, or the countless shades of red, gold and yellow in the autumn leaves. The French philosopher Albert Camus (1913-60) showed he belonged to this group when he said ‘Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower’.

Chocolate

Chocolate is a very special kind of food. Although certainly not a vital part of the human diet, it is loved for its delicious sweet taste and the way it melts in the mouth, and would be missed by many millions of people if it suddenly ceased to exist. Indeed, the global population of ‘chocoholics’ (people who find chocolate very difficult to resist) is very large. The most chocoholic countries in the world are in Europe; Switzerland and Austria top the list with an annual average consumption of around ten kilograms of chocolate per person, closely followed by Britain and Ireland.

Many people believe that eating chocolate has a mood-enhancing effect. There is disagreement, however, about whether this is due to the ingredients of chocolate or the significance attached to eating it. Some scientists have suggested that chocolate releases chemicals in the brain that create feelings of happiness, while others believe the happy feelings might only occur because people see eating chocolate as a way of being nice to themselves.

The vital ingredient in chocolate is the seeds of the cacao tree, which only grows in tropical countries. Cacao was first cultivated at least 2,500 years ago by the Maya and Aztec civilisations of Central America, which used the seeds to make a chocolate-flavoured drink. In the early sixteenth century, Spanish explorers who arrived in Central America recorded that the Aztec emperor, Montezuma, was particularly fond of this chocolate drink, although it was not mixed with sugar and therefore had a bitter rather than a sweet taste.

The three main varieties of chocolate are dark, milk and white (which doesn’t contain any solid part of the cacao seed, and perhaps therefore shouldn’t be considered ‘real’ chocolate). No one would pretend that eating large amounts of any of these is good for you, but there is some evidence to suggest that regularly eating small quantities of dark chocolate might reduce the risk of heart disease.

Cricket

Cricket, although loved by millions of people, is not one of the easiest sports to understand. Indeed, the game has lots of subtle complexities, and it’s probably fair to say that cricket fans tend to be quite proud of them.

The sport originated in England and spread to many parts of the former British Empire, hence its popularity today in countries such as Australia (the current world champions), New Zealand, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and many of the islands of the Caribbean.

You could perhaps describe cricket as being a bit similar to baseball, but cricket fans probably wouldn’t appreciate the comparison as they tend to see their game as much more sophisticated!

The basic facts of cricket are that it is played on a roughly oval -shaped grass field (usually at least 50% bigger than the average football pitch) by two teams of eleven players who take it in turns to ‘bat’ and to ‘field’.

The batting team has two of its players on the pitch at any one time, and the objective of these ‘batsmen’ is to score as many ‘runs’ as possible. To score runs the batsman uses a wooden bat to hit the ball that is thrown by the member of the fielding team known as the ‘bowler’. Unlike in baseball, the bowler has to make the ball bounce off the pitch before it reaches the batsman.

The bowler tries to get the batsman ‘out’, which usually happens in one of three ways: if the ball hits the ‘wicket’ (three vertical pieces of wood, about seventy centimetres high) that the batsman stands in front of; if the batsman uses his leg instead of his bat to block a ball that would have hit the wicket; or if one of the members of the fielding team catches the ball, after the batsman has hit it.

When ten of a team’s players are out, or when the bowling team has thrown the ball a certain number of times, it is the other team’s turn to bat. The team that scores more runs is the winner.

Fast Food

When most people hear the words ‘fast food’ they probably think of cheap, hot food sold in a place where they don’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes between ordering and taking their first bite, and where they can either ‘take away’ or ‘eat in’. They probably also imagine food they can eat with their fingers, without any cutlery.

In Britain, as in many other countries, hamburgers are among the most popular kinds of fast food, and the biggest chain of burger restaurants is McDonald’s. The first McDonald’s arrived in Britain in 1974, and now you can find them in many British cities. The restaurants in Britain recently added salads, fruit and sandwiches to their traditional menu of burgers, fries and soft drinks.

Kebabs, which usually consist of pieces of hot chicken or lamb in pitta bread with salad and chilli sauce, are also very popular. They are a part of Middle Eastern cuisine, and provide a good example of how ‘foreign’ food has become very popular in Britain in the last 40 years or so.

Perhaps the best example of traditional ‘British’ fast food is fish and chips, which means deep-fried white fish with chips that are much fatter than the American-style fries you find in most burger restaurants. The country has more than 11,000 fish and chip shops, and the British population eats fish and chips more than 250 million times a year, which means almost five times a year for every man, woman and child.

Many foreigners could find some things a bit strange in a fish and chip shop, for example the fact that many customers put a lot of salt and vinegar on their fish and chips, or the ‘mushy peas’ some people eat as an accompaniment. You could describe mushy peas as a hot, thick, light green, pea-flavoured paste, which perhaps doesn’t sound very nice. In fact, they are one those kinds of food that generate strong opinions – most people either love them or hate them.

Hawaii

Hawaii, a group of nineteen islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, has been part of the United States since 1959. As all American schoolchildren could tell you, it was the 50th and most recent state to join the US, and is the only state that is completely surrounded by water.

Hawaii is a very long way from anywhere else, for example, it takes five hours to fly from Hawaii to the west coast of the US.

The islands are famous for being very beautiful, and receive a lot of visitors from all over the world. Surfing is one of the most popular things for tourists to do in Hawaii. If you’ve ever seen pictures of tiny-looking surfers moving very fast on enormous blue waves, there is a good chance they were from the north coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

Oahu, the most developed of the islands, contains the biggest cities and is home to 80% of Hawaii’s population. It is also the island where you will find Waikiki, Hawaii’s most famous beach.

The first European to arrive in Hawaii was probably the British explorer Captain Cook in 1778. At that time all the people of Hawaii were Polynesians, but in the nineteenth century white Americans began to arrive. Nowadays the population is around 1.2 million, and also contains large numbers of descendants of immigrants from Asian countries such as Japan, the Philippines and China.

Anyone who has seen a film or TV programme set in Hawaii will know that Hawaiian men like to wear ‘aloha shirts’, which usually have a mixture of bright colours and unusual patterns (palm trees, for example). Most tourists leave Hawaii with at least one aloha shirt in their suitcases. The biggest British fan of the aloha shirt has got to be the famous DJ Fatboy Slim: he seems to have dozens, and most of them are as loud as his music.

Ireland

Ireland is a European country covering most of an island situated to the west of Great Britain. The other, smaller country on the island is Northern Ireland. Whereas Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom (along with England, Scotland and Wales), the Republic of Ireland is a separate country that became independent from the United Kingdom in the early 1920s.

The population of Ireland is around 4.3 million, the main religion is Catholicism, and the main language of everyday life is English. However there is another language called Gaelic (also referred to as ‘Irish’), which used to be spoken throughout the country before the English language arrived, and is still spoken in some areas.

Although Ireland is a small country, many aspects of its culture are quite well known around the world. The explanation for this goes back to the poverty that led millions of Irish people to emigrate during the 19th and 20th centuries. As a result there are now significant numbers of people with Irish ancestry in many different parts of the world, particularly in other English-speaking countries. According to a 2005 survey more than 10% of people in the United States have Irish ancestors.

There has been a huge change in Ireland’s economic situation in the last 30 years or so. Foreign investment has increased rapidly, particularly since the 1990s, and now the country is one of the richest in Europe. For the first time in its history there are a lot of immigrants arriving in search of work, for example from countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

Irish people have a reputation for being sociable and talkative, and Irish pubs are usually loud, friendly places. The most popular drink in these pubs, and indeed one of Ireland’s most famous exports, is a very dark, almost black beer called Guinness.

Princess Diana

On 29th July 1981, Diana Spencer got married to Prince Charles, the oldest son of Queen Elizabeth II, at St Paul’s Cathedral at London. About one billion people watched the wedding on television.

Diana, who was only twenty years at the time, became Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales. Less than a year earlier she had been a shy teenager working on a kindergarten in London, but after the wedding she has been in the public eye every days until her death on a car accident in Paris in August 1997. It is probably true to say that when she died she is the most famous woman in the world.

Diana born in the county of Norfolk in the east of England. Her family was rich and aristocratic, and had connections with the British royal family. At school she enjoyed sports and music (especially singing) more than studying, and hoped to became a ballerina.

She got engaged to Prince Charles on February 1981, not long after they had met for the first time. Though their wedding was a happy event, things probably started go wrong soon afterwards. Most people would now agree that they were never right for each other, but at the time there was very pressure on Prince Charles to get married, and the Royal Family seemed to think that Diana, despite her age, would make an appropriate husband.

Diana and Charles have two children – William and Harry, born in 1982 and 1984 – before they separated in 1992.

Diana was famous partly because her beauty and elegant clothes, and the way she made the British royal family more glamorous than it is before. However, from the late 1980s a lot of people also began to admire her for her charity work, particularly the time she gave to charities for people with AIDS.

The reaction to Diana’s suddenly death showed how popular she had become. Her funeral was an emotional event, with hundreds of thousands of people watching as a car took her coffin through the street of London.

Queen Elizabeth II

Elizabeth Windsor – or, to use her official title, Queen Elizabeth II – had her 80th birthday in April this year, making her one of the oldest monarchs in British history. She has been on the throne since her coronation on 2nd June 1953, 53 years ago.

The Queen has had a very different life from most other people. As a girl she studied music and art and enjoyed drama and swimming, but she did not go to school with other children – instead she had special lessons at home.

She got married at the age of 21 to Prince Philip, the son of Prince Andrew of Greece. They have four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward.

The Queen does not have much direct contact with the media, and has never given an interview. However, people know some of the things she does when she is not performing her public duties – for example she loves spending time with her corgis (a small, brown breed of dog – she has owned more than thirty of them in her lifetime), likes watching horse racing, and also enjoys photography.

Some interesting facts about the Queen were included in an official website celebrating her 80th birthday. Among them are the following: during her reign she has visited 129 countries and received more than 3 million letters and emails; she has received some very unusual presents, including a jaguar from Brazil; and according to a strange law from the fourteenth century, she is the owner of any dolphin or whale swimming in the sea around Britain.

The Queen will probably stay on the throne for the rest of her life. It is likely that the next monarch will be her oldest son, Prince Charles, but it could be her grandson Prince William, who is the son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana.

Although some British people would like their country to be a republic and not a monarchy, most would agree that the Queen has worked hard and tried to serve her country as well as she can – that is probably why she is more popular than any prime minister in British history.

The Rolling Stones

The four members of the Rolling Stones now have a combined age of over 250, but in the eyes of their fans they still deserve the title given them by their manager back in the late 1960s: ‘The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World’.

It’s certainly difficult to think of another group that has been so popular for such a long time. Since their formation in 1962, in London, they have sold more than 200 million albums worldwide, and songs such as (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (1965), Sympathy for the Devil (1968) and Brown Sugar (1971) are among the most well known in the history of popular music.

The Stones developed an original musical style that was a mixture of rhythm and blues (‘R&B’) – associated with black musicians in the United States – and rock and roll. They had a huge influence on many other bands that came after them, not only through their music but also through their rebellious image. Because of incidents such as the brief imprisonment of lead singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards for drug possession, in 1967, many people saw the Stones as outrageous, even slightly dangerous, in contrast to the softer, ‘boy next door’ image of the Beatles.

Jagger and Richards have always been responsible for creating most of the band’s new music. Brian Jones was also a very important figure during the first few years, but he died in 1969. Since Bill Wyman dropped out in 1993, the line-up has been Jagger and Richards plus Ron Wood (guitar) and Charlie Watts (drums).

The Stones have completed dozens of tours, often playing sell-out concerts to crowds in big stadiums, and despite their age there is no sign that they are ready for a quieter life.

Nowadays, however, the Stones are a great British institution rather than a group of rebellious outsiders – a fact illustrated in 2002 when Jagger received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, becoming Sir Mick Jagger.

The World’s Oceans

Water covers about 70% of the Earth’s surface. The world’s biggest ocean is the Pacific. It contains about 25,000 islands, which is more than the total number of islands in all the other oceans.

Nearly half the world’s ocean waters are more than 3,000 metres deep, and the average ocean depth is more than 3,500 metres. The deepest point of all, at almost 11,000 metres, is in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific. In 1960 a United States Navy submarine containing two people reached the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

The average ocean level is rising, and most scientists agree that global warming is one of the reasons for this. Scientists have estimated that ocean levels could rise by almost one metre in the next hundred years, which would have very serious consequences for people living in low-lying coastal areas.

Although many people found the film Jaws (1975) very frightening, the truth is that humans are much more of a threat to sharks than vice versa. Many millions of sharks die in fishing nets every year, even though fishing boats usually only catch them by accident. In contrast, sharks attack an average of fewer than one hundred people per year worldwide, and in most years fewer than ten attacks are fatal.

The biggest animal in the oceans is the blue whale, which grows to a length of about 30 metres and weighs about 200 tonnes. It is bigger than any of the dinosaurs that lived on Earth millions of years ago. Its heart is about the size of a small car, and its biggest blood vessel is so wide that a person could crawl down it.

The average temperature of the water near the surface of the world’s oceans is about 17 degrees centigrade.

Some sea birds are excellent swimmers, and the best of all is probably the penguin. The emperor penguin can dive to a depth of more than 200m and can stay underwater for 15 minutes.

What Is Jazz?

Jazz is the name of a certain kind of popular music. It was originally the music of the black people of the United States, but it developed into a coming-together of several different kinds of music from various parts of the world.

One of the basic features of jazz is its rhythm. Jazz melody combines elements from African and European music, but its harmony comes mainly from Europe. One important feature of jazz is improvisation. This means making something up on the spur of the moment. Much jazz is played that way. The music is made up as the players go along.

Over the years, jazz has changed and developed, but it has retained its basic quality. One of the forms of music that contributed to the development of jazz was the “blues”. About a third of jazz music is in the blues form. So are over half of the popular Rock-‘n’-Roll pieces. Even some of the Country and Western music of the United States is in the blues form.

A major step in the development of jazz was taken by musicians in New Orleans. New Orleans jazz, sometimes called Dixieland, had the deep emotion of the blues and the black spiritual as well as elements of Ragtime and European folk music.

Later on big-band jazz, or swing music developed. In the 1940’s and 1950’s came what was called “modern jazz”. This modern jazz was more complex in harmony and melody than earlier styles of jazz. But its most outstanding feature was its new approach to rhythm. The players used new rhythms in making their melodies, and the drummers played in a more complex style.

Another major step in the development of jazz was the “new thing” of the 1960’s. It is free-form jazz. A whole group of players may change the tempo or speed of a piece several times during a performance without planning to do so beforehand. This doesn’t mean that the music is disorganized, but that it is simply freer in spirit and approach. So you see, jazz is a form of music that is always changing, yet one that keeps its basic approach and quality.