Gardening
mound - насыпь
knot garden - a very formal design of garden in a square frame and grown with a variety or aromatic plants and culinary herbs
herbaceous border – цветочныйбордюр
manor house – помещичийдом
box – самшит
parterre – цветник
trellis - шпалера
The English garden, also called English landscape park is a style of Landscape garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French Garden of the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. It usually included a lake, sweeps of gently rolling lawns set against groves of trees, and recreations of classical temples, Gothic ruins, bridges, and other picturesque architecture, designed to recreate an idyllic pastoral landscape.
Garden styles at a glance:
Roman Britain: formal, low hedges
Medieval: small enclosed, with turf seats and mounds
Tudor: knot gardens, enclosed in hedges or walls
Stuart: formal Italianate and French styles
Georgian: informal, landscaped, open parkland
Victorian: bedding plants, colourful, public gardens
20th C: mixed styles, herbaceous borders
The earliest English gardens that we know of were planted by the Roman conquerors of Britain in the 1st century AD. It is carefully symmetrical formal planting of low box hedges.We know very little about the gardens of Anglo-Saxon England, which is another way of saying that the warlike Anglo-Saxons did not hold gardening to be important.
It was not until the Middle Ages that gardens once more became important in British life. There appeared little gardens in the monasteries.
Castles sometimes made room for small courtyard gardens, with paths through raised flower beds. Other common features of medieval castle gardens include turf seats and high mounds, or mounts, which provided a view over the castle walls. As castles gave way to fortified manor houses in the later medieval period, the garden became a simple green space surrounded by hedges or fences.
The Tudors followed Italian influence in creating gardens which mirrored the alignment of the house, creating a harmony of line and proportion that had been missing in the Medieval period. For the first time since the Romans left, sundials and statues were once more popular garden ornaments.
Stuarts were slaves to the French fashion for formal gardens. The chief feature of this French style are a broad avenue sweeping away from the house, flanked by rectangular parterres made of rigidly formal low hedges. The prime survivors of this style can be seen at Blickling Hall (Norfolk), Melbourne (Derbyshire) and Chatsworth.
The 18th century saw a swing from Renaissance formality to a more "natural" look. Lines were no longer straight, paths curve and wander, and parterres are replaced by grass. Trees were planted in clusters rather than in straight lines, and rounded lakes replaced the rectangular ponds of the earlier style. The garden became open, a park joining the house to the outside world rather than a carefully nurtured refuge from it.
In the Victorian era massed beds of flowers (bedding out plants raised in greenhouses) of exotic colours appeared. Some of the finest Victorian gardens are public parks, like People's Park in Halifax.
Gertrude Jekyll is arguably the most influential gardener of 20th century England. She popularized the herbaceous border and planning a garden based on colour schemes. Jekyll saw the house and garden as part of an integral whole, rather than the garden as an afterthought to the building. Her work survives at Marsh Court (Hampshire) and Hestercombe (Somerset).
Gardening has always been a matter of personal taste, and often the outstanding works of previous generations are torn down to make way for the style of the next. For that reason it is hard to find unaltered examples of historical gardens in England.
Yet, throughout Britain there are gardens great and small, formal and informal, private and public, that illustrate the British passion for creating green, growing spaces of their own. All are different, and all, like their owners and creators, have a distinct personality.
English gardens spread all over the continent. In Russia one of the best the examples of “wild” park is Pavlovsk, the summer residence or the emperor Paul I.
To sum up. Characteristics of the English Garden
The European "English garden" is characteristically on a smaller scale and more filled with "eye-catchers" than most English landscape gardens: grottoes, temples, tea-houses, belvederes, pavilions, sham ruins, bridges and statues, though the main ingredients of the landscape gardens in England are sweeps of gently rolling ground and water, against a woodland background with clumps of trees and outlier groves. The name— not used in the United Kingdom, where "landscape garden" serves— differentiates it from the formal baroque design of the Garden à la française.
The canonical European English park contains a number of Romantic elements. Always present is a pond or small lake with a pier or bridge. Overlooking the pond is a round or hexagonal pavilion, often in the shape of a monopteros, a Roman temple. Sometimes the park also has a "Chinese" pavilion. Other elements include a grotto and imitation ruins.
Sports in Great Britain
National sports in Great Britain... It is a very interesting question, because many kinds of sport have taken the origin in England.
The Englishmen love sports, they are called sports-lovers in spite of the fact that some of them neither play games nor even watch them. They only like to speak about sports.
Some kinds of sport are professional in England.
Many traditional sporting contests take place in England, for example, cricket. This game is associated with England. There are many cricket clubs in this country. English people like to play cricket. They think that summer without cricket isn't summer. If you want to play cricket you must wear white boots, a white shirt and white long trousers. There are two teams. Each team has eleven players. Cricket is popular in boys' schools. Girls play cricket too.
Football has got a long history. Football was played by the whole village teams in the middle ages in England. Now football is the most popular game in Britain. It is a team game. There are some amateur teams but most of the teams are professional ones in England. Professional football is a big business. Football is played at schools too. In rugby football you can see a ball, but it is not round. It is oval. This is a team game. There are fifteen players in each team. It is a popular game in England. There are many amateur rug-by football teams in this country.
Wimbledon is the centre of lawn tennis. Some years ago Wimbledon was a village, now it is a part of London. The most important tennis competition takes place there every summer.
There are some racing competitions in England. They are motor-car racing, dog-racing, donkey-racing, boat-racing, horse-racing. All kinds of racings are popular in England. It is interesting to see the egg-and-spoon race. The runner, who takes part in this competition, must carry an egg in a spoon. It is not allowed to drop the egg.
The boxing match has impacted the English language with phrases like "throwing in the towel", "hitting below the belt" and "punching above one's weight". The sport has also inspired a number of British writers, including George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle. (One sportswriter, knocked out by his own metaphors, described an unfortunate British heavyweight as the owner of "a glass jaw" who “fell in a straight, pure Doric line, like a tree crashing in the forest”.) It's an exciting sport, but not for everybody.
Golf in its early days in Scotland may well have had two distinct forms. One was a ‘short’ game similar to ‘kolf’ played in the Netherlands. From this developed ‘links golf’, played with a variety of clubs to holes, marked by flags, the fore runner of the game today.
Bobsleigh, was surprisingly invented by the English group of holidaymakers in Switzerland in 1890, wanted to create a sled that could carry people down the snow-covered road between St Moritz and Celerina. The sport started as a leisure activity for the rich young daredevils of Europe who gathered for fun on the alpine slopes. It was added to the Winter Olympics as a four-man event at the Winter Olympics in Chamonix 1924 and two-man later at Lake Placid in 1932.
The game of curling was invented in late medieval Scotland, as evidenced by a curling stone inscribed with the date 1511, uncovered along with another bearing the date 1551, when an old pond was drained at Dunblane, Scotland. The first written reference to a contest using stones on ice coming from the records of Paisley Abbey, Renfrew, in February 1541. One of the national games of Scotland, it has spread to many countries.
Darts began in Medieval England and is probably a spinoff of archery. Played started on ships where room was restricted, by shortening arrows and throwing them at the bottom of an empty wine barrel. Henry VIII enjoyed the game immensely. So much so, that he was given a beautifully ornate set by Anne Boleyn. The game remained popular throughout the British Empire but it wasn't until somewhere around 1900 that the rules and darts began to look like the game we play today.
Inventions and inventors
Joseph Swan was the British chemist and physicist responsible for the invention of the light bulb.
Alexander Graham Bell - invention of the first working telephone. Bell moved to the US in 1871, where he developed his interests in sign language and transmitting speech (both his mother and wife were deaf).
Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist discovered the antibiotic substance penicillin for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945.
John Logie Baird was a Scottish engineer, most famous for being the first person to demonstrate a fully working television. He was the father of the modern day goggle-box. Baird managed to achieve his first crude transmissions as early as 1924. You can still see Baird's original television and his experimental apparatus at Bradford's National Media Museum.
Ian Wilmut is an eminent English embryologist, best known as the leader of the Scottish research group that cloned Dolly the sheep back in 1996. Dolly was the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell, as opposed to an embryo cell. It was one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century.
Michael Aldrich is the English inventor and entrepreneur who was first to develop the idea of pre-internet online shopping or e-commerce, designing systems that allowed for online transactions between businesses and their customers as early as 1979.
Tim Berners-Lee
Berners-Lee is the British computer scientist and MIT professor who invented the World Wide Web.
X-ray computed tomography (CT)Digital geometry processing is used to generate a three-dimensional image of the inside of an object from a large series of two-dimensional X-ray images taken around a single axis of rotation.
A crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or rectangulargrid of white and shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. Crossword puzzles became a regular weekly feature in the World, and spread to other newspapers; the Boston Globe, for example was publishing them at least as early as 1917.
A tin can, tin (especially in British English), steel can, or a can, is an air-tightcontainer for the distribution or storage of goods, composed of thin metal, and requiring cutting or tearing of the metal as the means of opening. The tin can was patented in 1810 by the English inventor Peter Durand, based on experimental work by the Frenchman Nicolas Appert. He did not produce any food cans himself, but sold his patent to two other Englishmen, Bryan Donkin and John Hall, who set up a commercial canning factory, and by 1813 were producing their first canned goods for the British Army.
A digital audio player, shortened to DAP, is a consumer electronic device that stores, organizes and plays digital audio files. Often digital audio players are sold as MP3 players, even if they support other file formats. Kane Kramer designed one of the earliest digital audio players, which he called the IXI. His 1979 prototype was capable of approximately 3.5 minutes of audio playback but it did not enter commercial production.
.Hydrobob was created to help people who cannot dive and even swim to explore sea depths. The maximum possible depth is about 100 foots. The speed limit is 2 knots. When ridding driver’s head locates in a special sphere, bobble filled with oxygen. Now 350 of them are produced. One ride costs 25$. But 3 years earlier Russian guys created similar scooter and called him Aqua Star
Music
Throught its history the United Kingdom has been a major exporter of any kind of music . For British people themselves music plays a great role as well. Up today almost everybody longs to express himself, like his ancestors did, with brushes and paint, for instance, or music. But drawing is a sort of self-expression, when songs and music connect people, holds them close to each other.
The Beatles. The Beatles were a rock and pop band from Liverpool, England that formed in 1960. During their career, the group primarily consisted of John Lennon (rhythm guitar, vocals), Paul McCartney (bass guitar, vocals), George Harrison (lead guitar, vocals) and Ringo Starr (drums, vocals).
The Beatles were one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed bands in the history of popular music, selling over one billion records internationally. In the United Kingdom, The Beatles released more than 40 different singles, albums. This commercial success was repeated in many other countries;
The Beatles' innovative music and cultural impact helped define the 1960s, and their influence on pop culture is still evident today. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of top-selling Hot 100 artists to celebrate the chart's fiftieth anniversary; The Beatles topped it.
Radiohead are an English alternative rock band from Oxfordshire.
1st single "Creep", in 1992. The song was initially unsuccessful, but it became a worldwide hit several months after the release of their debut album, Pablo Honey (1993). Radiohead's popularity rose in the United Kingdom with the release of their second album, The Bends (1995).
Michael Gordon "Mike" Oldfield is an English multi-instrumentalistmusician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age, and more recently, dance. His music is often elaborate and complex in nature. He is best known for his hit 1973 album Tubular Bells, which launched Virgin Records, and for his 1983 hit single "Moonlight Shadow".
LZ became so famous 1stly because of they not afraid of mixing styles. Just listen their famous song – Stairway to heaven. This composition begins in lyrical way, butgraduallygaining pace, becomingfaster andfaster,andin the endwehave a classical hardrocktrackinthe bestof itsgenre.
Queen The history of group begins from 1968, when 2 young students – Brian May and Roger Taylor decided to form their own band, which were called positively – SMILE. And the singer was not Freddie Mercury for the 1st time. He was just band friend. And one day they’re became one band which is now is legendary known as QUEEN
Members of this band. Freddie Mercury. His real name is Faruh Balsar, and he’s from Iran. He was born at 5th September 1946 and, unfortunately, died from AID at 24th of November, 1991. Freddie had a lot of talents, except for famous vocal records. He was a great painter – look at his works, he was fond of theatre and ballet. Asthey say, a talented personis talentedatall. Nowadays, in Switzerland u can find the monument of FM. Here he is in his best-known pose – with fist in the air. Freddie was bisexual person. He had a girlfriend – Mary Ostin. They were best friends for about 20 years, and she was the only person, who was with Freddie at last minutes of his life.