Читать книгу Anglo-American Cultural Studies - Jody Skinner - Страница 10

The answer can be simple and easy: the US is a lot lot bigger than any European country taken individually. The US is roughly sixteen times larger than FranceFrance, the largest country in the European UnionEuropean Union. On the other hand, the US is only about five times larger than GreenlandGreenland, which although politically connected to Denmark isn’t part of the EU. But the US is twenty-seven times bigger than GermanyGermany and almost forty times bigger than the United KingdomUnited Kingdom. But at least Germany is bigger than almost any of the states of the United States taken individually. Only the states of AlaskaAlaska, TexasTexas, CaliforniaCalifornia, and MontanaMontana are each bigger than Germany.

how big exactly?Well, you may ask, just how big is the US? Would you prefer the US Census BureauCensus Bureau’s figure of 3,537,438.44 square miles or the CIA World Fact Book’s figure of 9,826,630 square kilometers or the United Nations’ figure of 9,629,091 square kilometers? If you have a hard time imagining what these numbers mean, then what about comparing how long it would take you to drive from the East coast, say from New YorkNew York, the largest city in the US, all the way across the country to the second largest city, Los AngelesLos Angeles, on the West coast? Well, if you drove according to the old national [9]speed limit of 55 miles per hour (which converts to a wonderfully leisurely 88 kilometers per hour), it would take more than 44 hours non-stop driving from the Big AppleBig Apple to the City of AngelsCity of Angels, comparable to driving from the CologneCologne CathedralCologne Cathedral southwest all the way through FranceFrance and SpainSpain right down to where Europe ends at Gibraltar and then back again including a final one-way trip to FrankfurtFrankfurt Airport. And what would you see in the US on the 44-hour marathon from the east to the west?