1. London: London, capital of Great Britain in the southeast of England, is one of the largest cities in the world. It is divided into many administrative units, the largest of which is Greater London and the City of London is the heart of this unit. The City of London takes up a very small area, about one square mile, lying north of the Thames near London Bridge. This area is the business centre of the country.

    London is the national centre of government, trade, commerce, shipping, finance and industry; it is also one of the cultural centres of the world.

    London is a historic city with many beautiful buildings. The Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral are major tourist attractions. The city is also famous for its art galleries and museums. Among these are the British Museum, which comprises the British National Museum of Antiquities and Ethnography and the British National Library, the National Gallery which contains Britain’s best-known collection of pictures, and the National Portrait Gallery.

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    2. Blue jeans: Blue jeans are trousers made of strong blue cotton cloth, worn for work and informally by men, women, and children. Blue jeans are also called Cowboy jeans because cowboys liked to wear such trousers.

    Levi Strauss, a German immigrant, was the inventor of blue jeans. When he went West, where he hoped to find gold and become rich, he brought with him some canvas, a kind of strong cloth. He used this cloth to make canvas pants, which soon became very popular among the miners. When he ran out of canvas, he asked his relatives in New York to send him more. Instead, they sent him the wrong cloth. This kind of cloth came from Genes. Levi changed the spelling of Genes to jeans, dyed the cloth blue, and called his new pants blue jeans.

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    3. Ernest Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), spokesman for the “Lost Generation”, was an influential US novelist and short-story writer. His simple and direct style of writing has been widely imitated by many other writers, and his stories of courage in the face of death are reread by each new generation.

    The Sun Also Rises, his first major novel, was published in 1926, and met with great success. A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) were based on his own experiences in WWI and the Spanish Civil War respectively and added greatly to his reputation as a writer. In 1952, Hemingway published his last successful novel, The Old Man and the Sea. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout his life, Hemingway wrote many short stories. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The killers are probably the best known.

    Hemingway was a man of many contradictions. He was extremely generous and extremely selfish. He loved life, yet he continually pondered death. His life was bold and courageous, yet his courage deserted him in the end. Increasingly ill and depressed, he committed suicide in 1961.

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