2.4 Yellowstone, the First National Park of the usa

Yellowstone is the United States’ first and most famous national park. This large wilderness area is very high in the Rocky Mountains of the northwestern U.S.

Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in 1872.

Yellowstone has many different kinds of unusual scenery. The valley of the Yellowstone River has beautifully coloured rocks and three large waterfalls. The high mountains around Yellowstone are covered with evergreen forests. Great grizzly bears live there. The bears sometimes come down into the camps to look for food. Other wild animals move around freely in the park.

Yellowstone Park has many areas with hot springs and geysers or hot water fountains. These are caused by heat from the hot centre of the earth. Old Faithful geyser is the most famous. Every seventy minutes, Old Faithful sends hot water about 50 metres high into the air. Here, hot spring water runs down over rocks into deep pools. It looks like a fantastic white cake.

In winter, Yellowstone Park is covered with heavy snow, but visitors still come to ski and skate. With clouds of steam above them and snow all around, Yellowstone’s hot springs look even more wonderful.

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2.5 Natural wonders of the usa (Part 1)

Nothing is so amazing and so mysterious as the wonders that are created by nature.

There are hundreds of natural wonders around the world that would take a lifetime to see. The United States of America has some of the most beautiful natural wonders of the world. There are waterfalls and rainforests, reefs and erupting volcanoes, deserts and giant redwood trees.

Death Valley (Долина смерти)

Death Valley is a 250 km valley between two Californian mountain ranges. It is the hottest and the lowest place in the USA, and at one famous point – Badwater Basin – you arrive at the lowest place in the western hemisphere (86 metres below sea level). Summer temperatures in Death Valley can reach 54°C.

Giant Redwood and Bristlecone PineTrees (Редвуд)

General Sherman, a giant redwood tree of 84 metres high, is the largest plant in the world. It is also 3,000 years old, but it isn’t the oldest tree in the world! That’s also in California. The bristlecone pine grows in the White Mountains, and it is the oldest living thing on earth. The most famous, named Methuselah, is over 4,000 years old.

Niagara Falls (Ниагарский водопад)

The Niagara Falls are formed where the Niagara River flows between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. There are two main waterfalls: the Horseshoe Falls in Canada and American Falls in the USA. The falls are 55 metres high, and 160000 cubik metres of water flow over them every minute.

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6. Natural wonders of the USA (Part 2)

Grand Canyon (Arizona) (Большой каньон)

The Grand Canyon, eroded over thousands of years by the Colorado River, is 400 km long. It is 2,000 metres deep at its deepest point and 30 km wide at its widest point. It is one of the most important geological sites in the world (some of the rocks are over 1,800 million years old) and it is home to a great diversity of wildlife.

The Great Lakes (Великие озера)

The Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario) form the largest system of fresh water on earth, containing 18% of the world’s supply. Lake Superior is the largest and the deepest. It has the largest surface area of any freshwater lake in the world (81,000 square km) and holds enough water to cover the entire continents of North and South America with a third of a metre of water.

Glacier Bay (Alaska) (Ледниковая бухта)

Glacier Bay is a wilderness of mountains, glaciers, estuaries, beaches and lakes which was covered by ice only 200 years ago. The glaciers of Glacier Bay are still retreating, revealing new landscapes every few years. Glacier Bay is now a nature reserve and is used extensively for scientific research.

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Part 3. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northen Ireland

3.1 The country and a county

The British Isles is the name for a collection of about 4000 islands, including Great Britain and Ireland. Great Britain or GB is the name for the largest of the islands in the British Isles. It includes England, Scotland and Wales. It does not include Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. You see the abbreviation GB on driving licenses of people who live in England, Scotland and Wales.

The United Kingdom or UK is a political term which includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The abbreviation UK is used on official documents produced by Parliament.

Everybody from the UK is British, but be careful: only people from England are English. People from Wales think of themselves as Welsh, from Scotland as Scottish, from Northern Ireland as British or Irish.

Britain is split up into counties. The word county describes an area with its own local government. County councils rule such things as education and housing. They look after roads, libraries and swimming pools.

Many counties like Yorkshire or Lancashire contain the word “shire”, which is the old word for county. In writing they usually abbreviate the names of counties with the word shire, so Lancashire becomes Lancs, Yorkshire becomes Yorks, but Essex stays Essex and Kent stays Kent.

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