London transport.

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RUDYARD KIPLING
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. His father was an art teacher. As a child, he learned to speak both English and Hindi. When he was three, he visited England for the first time. His parents wanted to give him an English education, so in 1871 they took him to England. He stayed in Southsea, in “the house of desolation” as he called it. There he started his education. From 1878 to 1882 he attended Westward Ho School that prepared future army officers for service in the colonies. In 1882, Kipling returned in India. There he began working as journalist, and writing short stories and poems for the newspapers. In 1889, Kipling went back in England. He went to live in London, and soon became famous as the author of stories of Indian life, and poems about the life of soldiers in the British army in India. Kipling was able to describe the British Empire from the point of view of the rulers and administrators, but also from the point of view of the common British soldier and the Indian people. In 1882 he got married and went to the USA where he lived for five years. He then returned to England where bought a beautiful house in East Sussex. In 1894 and 1895, Kipling wrote two of is most famous works, “The Jungle book” and “The second Jungle book”. In these books he tells the stories of Mowgli, a child adopted by a family of wolves in the jungle. Kim is an other famous story that he wrote in 1901 in the which he tells the adventures of the son of an Irish sergeant and an Indian woman. In 1907, he was the first English writer to receive the Nobel prize for Literature. During the First World War, his only son died, and from this moment on, Kipling’s stories and poems became more pessimistic. He died in 1936.
LONDON TRANSPORT
During an average working day, London Transport carries over six million passengers and its buses and underground trains travel a total of around 500.000 miles. London’s underground railway is know as the “the tube”.
The tube
The first section of the London underground opened on 10th January 1863 between Farringdon Street and Edgware Road. There are now 67 underground railways in the world. The London underground has got 251 miles of track and 102 miles actually run underground. Along each line there are signal lights. After a train passes light, light turns red. This tells the driver of the next train to stop. On the Victoria line the trains are almost completely automatic. A machine tells them how fast to go end where to stop at each platform. The driver in the cab have just to control them between stations.
The bus
Probably the best way to explore London is to travel by bus. Sometimes conductors know a lot about their route. They may be glad to answer a question or two about where the bus is going. Sit on the top deck, in a double-decker bus, you can look over walls and the bridges.
The London Transport Museum
You can play in the traffic without breaking any laws or giving the rest of the world heart attack at the London transport Museum. Here you can sit in the driver’s seat of London double-decker, jump on and off a tram and examine buses from over a century ago. There is also a replica of London’s first omnibus; its price was 1 shilling.