Extension. Ex. 40.Write a guided tour around the centre of London with the description of its sightseeing using the information of the Unit 4

Ex. 40.Write a guided tour around the centre of London with the description of its sightseeing using the information of the Unit 4.

Ex. 41. a) Write a geographical description of your own country using Ex.18.

b) Write a tourists description of your own town using Ex. 27 and Ex.29.

Ex. 42. Express your view on the text and relate it to your own experiences. Write a summery of it.

The huddled masses have a new destination. As a proportion of its population, and in absolute numbers, London now has a higher inflow of foreigners than do either New York or Los Angeles. More are coming, and staying, than ever before. According to many voices in the papers, politics and pressure groups, this must be a time-bomb.

For 20 years, until the early 1990, net immigration to Britain hovered around the zero mark, plus or minus 50,000. Then numbers started rising. The end of the cold war led to civil conflicts that drove people out of their homelands. Growing prosperity gave more and more people access to air travel. The trains through the Channel Tunnel, which started running in 1993, offered them another route in to Britain.

And there were good reasons to come to Britain. Its economy has done better, over the past ten years, than those of the other big European countries. London was the magnet. Big Bang – the liberalization of the financial services industry in the late 1980s – led to a decade-long boom in the City. That meant jobs not just to American and French bankers, but also Colombian and Somali cleaners. London where the police never check your identity papers, is a great place for foreigner, legal or illegal. Anybody can find a comforting bunch of people of their own nationality somewhere in the city. Anybody can turn up one evening and find a job, or some sort, the next morning. Anybody can disappear.

Getting in became easily, too. The government has encouraged immigration by issuing more work permits, especially in areas where skills are in short supply – nurses, doctors, IT professionals, for instance. In the mid-1990s, around 30,000 work permits a year were being issued. In 2002, 137,000 were. More people have been given asylum; and, as the system got bogged down, more people have waited longer while their applications were processed. So, by 2001, net migration to Britain as a whole had risen to 172,000, with 120,000 of them bound for London and the south-east. And there’re only the legal ones.

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