Communications and travel

10.3.1. Historically, railroads played a very important role in the history of the country. The Victorian era was also known as the Railway Age. The world’s first public railway was the Stockton and Darlington, which opened in 1825. It was built by George Stephenson. One of the latest large-scale construction projects is the Channel Tunnel that links England with France and runs underground beneath the relatively shallow English Channel. It was finished in 1994 and cost more than $16 billion to complete, twice its estimated budget. It has enormous symbolic importance as an unbroken link between Britain and the Continent.

10.3.2. Along with other industries, the airlines were nationalized after World War II, but they were privatized in the late 1980s. British Airways is one of the world’s leading airlines and operates the world’s largest network of international scheduled services. London’s main airports, Heathrow a nd Gatwick, are among the world’s busiest centers for international travel. There are another 146 licensed civil airfields in Britain. The Post Office was founded in 1635 and is noted in history for issuing the famous Penny Black, the world’s first adhesive stamp, in 1840.

10.3.2. Mass media is a term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience. It was coined in the 1920s (with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines), although mass media was present centuries before the term became common. Media refers to organize means of dissemination of fact, opinion, entertainment, and other information, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, banners, billboards, films, TV, the World Wide Web, CDs, DVDs, videocassettes, etc.

10.3.4. Newspapers developed from around 1605, with the first example in English in 1620; but they took until the nineteenth century to reach a mass-audience directly. Regular newspaper publication dates from the 1650s. During the Civil War there were regular news-sheets and then news books carrying general information along with propaganda. Following the Restoration there arose a number of publications including the London Gazette (first published on November 16, 1665), the first official newspaper of the Crown. In 1788, there came The Times. This was the most significant newspaper of the first half of the 19th century, but from around 1860 there were a number of more strongly competitive titles, each differentiated by its political biases and interests.

Britain has two kinds of national newspaper – the quality papers and the tabloids. The qualities usually deal with home and overseas news, with detailed and extensive coverage of sports and cultural events. The tabloids are smaller in size. They offer news for the less interested in daily news reports. They are characterized by large headlines, carry a lot of big photographs, and concentrate on the personal aspects of news, with reports of the recent sensational and juicy bits of events.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-07