Kinetic (
EnglishTogether)
Home to a range of universities, colleges and schools, London has a student population of about 378,000[96] and is a centre of research and development. Most primary and secondary schools in London follow the same system as the rest of England.
With 125,000 students, the University of London is the largest contact teaching university in the United Kingdom and in Europe.[97] It comprises 20 colleges as well as several smaller institutes, each with a high degree of autonomy. Constituent colleges have their own admissions procedures, and are effectively universities in their own right, although most degrees are awarded by the University of London rather than the individual colleges. Its constituents include multi-disciplinary colleges such as UCL, King's and Royal Holloway and more specialised institutions such as the London School of Economics, SOAS, the Royal Academy of Music and the Institute of Education.
The London School of Economics, Imperial College London, King's and UCL have been ranked among some of the best universities in the whole world by The Times Higher Education Supplement: in 2006 Imperial was ranked 9th, the London School of Economics was ranked 17th, UCL 25th, and King's 46th in the world.[98]
London's other universities, such as Brunel University, City University, London Metropolitan University, Imperial College London, Middlesex University, University of East London, the University of Westminster and London South Bank University, are not part of the University of London. Some were polytechnics until these were granted university status in 1992, and others which were founded much earlier. London is also known globally for its business education, with the London Business School (ranked 1st in Europe - Business Week) and Cass Business School (Europe's largest finance school) both being top world-rated business schools.
London is home to many museums, galleries, and other institutions which are major tourist attractions as well as playing a research role. The Natural History Museum (biology and geology), Science Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum (fashion and design) are clustered in South Kensington's "museum quarter", while the British Museum houses historic artefacts from around the world. The British Library at St Pancras is the UK's national library, housing 150 million items.[99] The city also houses extensive art collections, primarily in the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. See the list of museums in London.
Kinetic (
EnglishTogether)
Though the UK does not have a de jure official language, the predominant spoken language is English, a West Germanic language descended from Old English, featuring a large number of borrowings from Old Norse and Norman. The other indigenous languages are Scots (which is closely related to English) and the Insular Celtic languages (which are not). The latter fall into two groups: the P-Celtic languages (Welsh and the Cornish language); and the Q-Celtic languages (Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Manx). Celtic dialectal influences from Cumbric persisted in Northern England for many centuries, most famously in a unique set of numbers used for counting sheep (see Yan Tan Tethera).
DrCrew (
