SCHOOL-LEAVING AGE
Children have to stay at school until the age of 16. There is no upper age limit.

ALCOHOL
You have to be 18 to buy alcohol in a shop or a pub, but if you are 16 and you are having a meal in a pub, you can drink beer or wine with it.

PROSECUTION
In Scotland, you can be prosecuted for a crime at the age of 8. In England and Wales, the age is 10. You can't be sent to prison until you are 21.

Public transport services in urban areas, as elsewhere in Europe, suffer from the fact that there is so much private traffic on the roads that they are not as cheap, as frequent or as fast as they otherwise could be. They also stop running inconveniently early at night. Efforts have been made to speed up journey times by reserving certain lanes for buses, but so far there has been no widespread attempt to give priority to public transport vehicles at traffic lights. An interesting modern development is that trams, which disappeared from the country's towns during the 1950Sand 1960 s, are now making a comeback. Research has shown that people seem to have more confidence in the reliability of a service which runs on tracks, and are therefore readier to use a tram than they would be to use an ordinary bus.

Britain is on e of the few countries in Europe where double-decker buses (I.e. with two floors) are a common Sight. Although single-deckers have also been in use since the I960s, London still has more than 3,000 double-deckers in operation. In their original form they were 'hop-o n, hop-off ' buses. That is, there were no doors, just an opening at the back to the outside .There was a conductor who walked around collecting fares while the bus was moving. However, most buses these days , including double-deckers, have separate doors for getting on and off and no conductor (fares are paid to the driver).

        Britain and good food are two things which are not commonly associated. Visitors to Britain have widely varying opinions about all sorts of aspects of the country, but most of them seem to agree that the food is terrible. Why? One reason could simply be that British tastes are different from everybody else's. However, the most common complaint is not so much that British food has a strange, unpleasant taste, but rather that it has very little taste at all. The vegetables, for example, are overcooked. It is all too bland.

People often refer to Britain by another name. They call it 'England'. But this is not strictly correct, and it can make some people angry. England is only one of the four nations of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland).