Group: 11-19Chi-20

INDEPENDENT WORK

Foreign language faculty

Group: 11-19Chi-20
Teacher: Niyazova M. X.
Student: Abduraupova Sh.R.
Subject: ITK
Theme: Culture of the Unuted Kingdom

Culture of the United Kingdom

British culture is influenced by the combined nations' history; its historically Christian religious life, its interaction with the cultures of Europe, the traditions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the impact of the British Empire. Although British culture is a distinct entity, the individual cultures of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are diverse and have varying degrees of overlap and distinctiveness.
British literature is particularly esteemed. The modern novel was invented in Britain, and playwrights, poets, and authors are among its most prominent cultural figures. Britain has also made notable contributions to music, cinema, art, architecture and television. The UK is also the home of the Church of England, the state church and mother church of the Anglican Communion, the third-largest Christian denomination. Britain contains some of the world's oldest universities, has made many contributions to philosophy, science, technology and medicine, and is the birthplace of many prominent scientists and inventions. The Industrial Revolution began in the UK and had a profound effect on the family socio-economic and cultural conditions of the world. As a result of the British Empire significant British influence can be observed in the language, law, culture and institutions of its former colonies, most of which are members of the Commonwealth of Nations. A subset of these states form the Anglosphere, and are among Britain's closest allies. British colonies and dominions influenced British culture in turn, particularly British cuisine. Sport is an important part of British culture, and numerous sports originated in the country including Cricket, football and rugby.

The UK has been described as a "cultural superpower", and London has been described as a world cultural capital. A global opinion poll for the BBC saw the UK ranked the third most positively viewed nation in the world (behind Germany and Canada) in 2013 and 2014.

Flag of United Kingdom

Coat of arms of United Kingdom

The royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, or the royal arms for short, is the arms of dominion of the British monarch, currently Queen Elizabeth II. These arms are used by the Queen in her official capacity as monarch of the United Kingdom. Variants of the royal arms are used by other members of the British royal family, by the British Government in connection with the administration and government of the country, and some courts and legislatures in a number of Commonwealth realms. A Scottish version of the royal arms is used in and for Scotland. The arms in banner form serve as basis for the monarch's official flag, the Royal Standard.

Language
First spoken in early medieval England, the English language is the de facto official language of the UK, and is spoken monolingually by an estimated 95% of the British population. Seven other languages are recognised by the British Government under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages – Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Irish, Ulster Scots, and British Sign Language.

In Wales, all pupils at state schools must either be taught through the medium of Welsh or study it as an additional language until age 16, and the Welsh Language Act 1993 and the Government of Wales Act 1998 provide that the Welsh and English languages should be treated equally in the public sector, so far as is reasonable and practicable. Irish and Ulster Scots enjoy limited use alongside English in Northern Ireland, mainly in publicly commissioned translations. The Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2005, recognised Gaelic as an official language of Scotland and required the creation of a national plan for Gaelic to provide strategic direction for the development of the Gaelic language. The Cornish language is a revived language that became extinct as a first language in Cornwall in the late 18th century.

Regional Accents
Dialects and regional accents vary heavily amongst the four countries of the United Kingdom, as well as within the countries themselves. This is partially the result of the long history of immigration to the UK, for example Northern English dialects contain many words with Old Norse roots. Scottish English, Welsh English, and Hiberno-Irish are varieties of English distinct from both English English and the native languages of those countries. Received Pronunciation is the Standard English accent in England and Wales, while in Scotland Scottish Standard English is a distinct dialect. Although these accents have a high social prestige, since the 1960s a greater permissiveness toward regional English varieties has taken hold in education.

The great variety of British accents is often noted, with nearby regions often having highly distinct dialects and accents, for example there are large differences between Scouse and Mancunian despite Liverpool and Manchester being only 35 miles (56 km) apart. Dialectal English is often found in literature, for example Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights contains Yorkshire dialect.

The Old English heroic poem Beowulf is located in the British Library
Art
Literature
The United Kingdom inherited the literary traditions of England, Scotland and Wales. These include Arthurian literature and its Welsh origins, Norse-influenced Old English literature, the works of English authors Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, and Scots works such as John Barbour's The Brus.

Robert Burns is regarded as the national poet of Scondland.

The early 18th century period of British literature is known as the Augustan Age and included the development of the novel. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) are often seen as the first English novels, however the development of the novel took place in a wider literary context that included the rise of prose satires – which reached a high point with
Gulliver's Travels – and earlier foreign works like the Spanish Don Quixote. Also linked to the Augustan period is Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language. Published in 1755, it was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later.
Science and technology
From the time of the Scientific Revolution, England and Scotland, and thereafter the United Kingdom, have been prominent in world scientific and technological development. The Royal Society serves as the national academy for sciences, with members drawn from different institutions and disciplines. Formed in 1660, it is one of the oldest learned societies still in existence.

Sir Isaac Newton's publication of the Principia Mathematica ushered in what is recognisable as modern physics. The first edition of 1687 and the second edition of 1713 framed the scientific context of the foundation of the United Kingdom. He realised that the same force is responsible for movements of celestial and terrestrial bodies, namely gravity. He is the father of classical mechanics, formulated as his three laws and as the co-inventor (with Gottfried Leibniz) of differential calculus. He also created the binomial theorem, worked extensively on optics, and created a law of cooling.

Charles Darwin established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors.

Religious

Anglican churches remain the largest faith group in each country of the UK except Scotland, where Anglicanism is a small minority. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland is the national church in Scotland. Following this is Roman Catholicism and religions including Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism. Today British Jews number around 300,000; the UK has the fifth largest Jewish community worldwide.
William Tyndale's 1520s translation of the Bible was the first to be printed in English, and was a model for subsequent English translations, notably the King James Version in 1611. The Book of Common Prayer of 1549 was the first prayer book to include the complete forms of service for daily and Sunday worship in English, and the marriage and burial rites have found their way into those of other denominations and into the English language.

John Speed’s Genealogies Recorded in the Sacred Scriptures, bound into first King James Bible in quarto size (1612)

Politics and government

The UK has a parliamentary government based on the Westminster system that has been emulated around the world – a legacy of the British Empire. The Parliament of the United Kingdom that meets in the Houses of Parliament has two houses: an elected House of Commons and an appointed House of Lords, and any Bill passed requires Royal Assent to become law. It is the ultimate legislative authority in the United Kingdom: the devolved parliaments and assemblies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are not sovereign bodies and could be abolished by the UK Parliament, despite each being established following public approval as expressed in a referendum.

The UK's two major political parties are the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, who between them won 568 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons at the most recent general election. Currently, the third biggest party in terms of seats in the Commons is the Scottish National Party (SNP). At the most recent election, the SNP won 48 out of the 59 Scottish constituencies. The Liberal Democrats, or Lib Dems, were the fourth largest, at 11 seats. One seat was won by the Green Party. The remaining seats were won by regional parties, namely Plaid Cymru (Wales), the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Democratic Unionist Party, and Sinn Féin (Northern Ireland).

The Law
British constitutional documents include Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights 1689 (one provision granting freedom of speech in Parliament), Petition of Right, Habeas Corpus Act 1679 and Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949. A separate but similar document, the Claim of Right Act, applies in Scotland. Jurist Albert Venn Dicey wrote that the British Habeas Corpus Acts "declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty". An advocate of the "unwritten constitution", Dicey stated English rights were embedded in the general English common law of personal liberty, and "the institutions and manners of the nation".