Most towns have a main shopping area called the town centre. Covered shopping centres are common too, either in the middle of town or on the edge. Most shops in the UK open seven days a week, though they usually have shorter hours on Sundays and public holidays. In many towns there is also a market on one or more days a week, where traders sell all sorts of things from stalls.
British people like to cook and often invite friends round for a meal. Thanks to a long history and a very mixed population, people in the UK eat a huge variety of food. Still, each of the four nations has a "signature dish", and these are favourites in the test:
Traditional food from the four nations. A memory aid: England has the beef, Wales has the little cakes, Scotland has the stuffed sheep's stomach, and Northern Ireland has a whole plate of fried breakfast.
England: roast beef, with potatoes, vegetables and Yorkshire pudding. Despite the name, Yorkshire pudding is not a dessert: it is batter (a runny mix of flour, eggs and milk) baked in a hot oven. Fish and chips are also a favourite.
Wales: Welsh cakes, small flat cakes of flour, spices and dried fruit, which you can eat warm or cold.
Scotland: haggis: offal (heart, liver and other organs), suet (hard fat), onions and oatmeal, all cooked inside a sheep's stomach.
Northern Ireland: the Ulster fry, a big plate where everything is fried: eggs, bacon and sausages, black and white pudding, mushrooms and tomatoes, plus potato bread and soda bread.
People take these dishes seriously. In 2008 the Royal Society of Chemistry declared, partly as a joke, that anything less than 4 inches (about 10 cm) tall can't be called a Yorkshire pudding. Haggis is closely linked with the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who wrote a poem called Address to a Haggis; on Burns Night, his birthday on 25 January, people read the poem aloud before the haggis is cut open.
Quiz
Which of the following statements is correct?
"Ulster" is often used to mean Northern Ireland, so the Ulster fry comes from Northern Ireland. Scotland's dish is haggis.
