The united kingdom

Exercise 12. Read the text below and do the tasks that follow it.

THE UNITED KINGDOM

	The British Isles form a group lying off the north-west coast of Europe.
	The largest islands are Great Britain proper (comprising the mainlands of England, Wales and Scotland) and Ireland (comprising Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic).
	Great Britain together with Northern Ireland constitutes the United Kingdom.
	Thus, the United Kingdom is composed of four countries.
	The largest of these is England which is divided into 45 administrative counties.
	The capital city is London which is situated in south-east England.
	The United Kingdom has a total area of about 244,100 square kilometres.
	About 70% is devoted to agriculture, about 7% is wasteland, moorland and mountains; about 13% is devoted to urban development, and 10 % is forest and woodland.
	The seas surrounding the British Isles are very shallow because the islands lie on the continental shelf[1].
	Despite their small area, the British Isles contain rocks of all the main geological periods.
	In Great Britain the newer rocks, which are less resistant to weather, and have thus been worn down to form low land, lie to the south and east; and the island can, therefore, be divided roughly into two main regions: Lowland Britain and Highland Britain.
	In Lowland Britain the newer and softer rocks of southern and eastern England have been eroded into a rich plain, more often rolling than flat and rising to chalk and limestone hills, but hardly ever reaching a thousand feet above sea level.
	The boundaries of this region run roughly from the mouth of the Tyne in the north-east of England to the mouth of the Exe in the south-west.
	Highland Britain comprises the whole of Scotland as well as the mountains of the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District in north-west England, the broad central upland known as the Pennines, almost the whole of Wales, and the south-western peninsula of England coinciding approximately with the counties of Devon and Cornwall.
	Highland Britain contains all the mountainous parts of Great Britain and extensive uplands lying above one thousand feet.
	This high ground, however, is not continuous but is interspersed with valleys and plains.
	Britain’s complex geology is one of the main reasons for its rich variety of scenery found within short distances, particularly on the coast.
	The ancient rocks of Highland Britain often reach the coast in towering cliffs; elsewhere the sea may penetrate in deep lochs, as along much of the west coast of Scotland.
	Even around Lowland Britain there are striking contrasts.
	In some parts the soft, white limestone – the chalk – forms the world-famous white cliffs of Dover or the Needles off the Isle of Wight; while other parts of the south and south-east coastline have beaches of sand and shingle.
	The eastern coast of England, between the Humber[2] and the Thames estuary, is for the most part low-lying, and for hundreds of years, some stretches of it have been protected against the sea by embankments.
	These have occasionally been breached, as in the flood disaster of January 1953, which was caused by violent gales and exceptionally high tides[3].
	The marked tidal movement around the British Isles sweeps away much of the sand and mud brought down by the rivers and makes the estuaries of the short British rivers valuable as natural harbours.

[1] The continental shelf is the extended perimeter of each continent and associated coastal plain.

[2] The Humber is a large tidal estuary on the east coast of Northern England. It is formed at Trent Falls, Faxfleet, by the confluence of the tidal River Ouse and the tidal River Trent.

[3] Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted (приводимые в действие) by the Moon and the Sun and the rotation of the Earth.

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