Life in the UK Practice Test 27

Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982; Britain sent a naval task force to the South Atlantic and recovered the islands after a short war.

The Channel Tunnel was officially opened in 1994, giving Britain a fixed rail link with France for the first time.

As the last Ice Age ended, melting ice raised sea levels and flooded the land connection to the continent, separating Britain from mainland Europe about 10,000 years ago.

The wall ran for about 73 miles (roughly 117 kilometres), from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west.

The wall lies entirely within what is now England, some distance south of the modern Anglo-Scottish border; it marked the northern frontier of Roman Britain.

Boudicca was queen of the Iceni, a tribe based in what is now Norfolk, and she led their uprising against Roman rule.

Alfred is the only English king to be known by the title 'the Great', earned through his defence of his kingdom against the Vikings and his reforms.

In 793 Viking raiders attacked the wealthy monastery on Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast - a shock that announced the beginning of Viking raids on Britain.

At Sutton Hoo a great ship had been hauled ashore and buried beneath a mound, with a burial chamber full of treasures such as a famous helmet and gold ornaments.

William the Conqueror ordered the building of the White Tower, begun in the late 1070s, as a fortress to assert Norman power over London.

John met the barons at Runnymede, a meadow by the Thames near Windsor, and there sealed the Magna Carta in June 1215.

The rival houses were Lancaster, whose badge was a red rose, and York, whose badge was a white rose.

Wat Tyler led the Kentish rebels into London in 1381 and was fatally wounded during a confrontation with the Lord Mayor of London while meeting King Richard II.

With so few workers left alive, labourers could demand higher wages, and despite laws trying to hold wages down, many moved away to sell their labour where the pay was better.

By defeating Richard III at Bosworth in 1485, Henry VII founded the Tudor dynasty, which ruled England until 1603.

The Mary Rose sank in the Solent in July 1545, during a battle with a French invasion fleet, within sight of Henry VIII watching from the shore.

Mary was a Catholic claimant to Elizabeth's throne. Raised in France and a focus for Catholic hopes in England, she became the centre of plots against the Protestant Elizabeth — plots in which she was eventually implicated, leading to her execution in 1587.

Fawkes was found in the cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament, guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder the plotters had hidden there, and was arrested before the plot could be carried out.

Newton's Principia, setting out the laws of motion and universal gravitation, was published in 1687, and the Authorised Version of the Bible appeared in 1611. Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the Middle Ages, centuries earlier, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was first compiled in the reign of Alfred the Great, in the 800s.

The Battle of Edgehill in Warwickshire, fought on 23 October 1642, was the first major battle of the war, and it ended without a clear winner.

Following the Royalist defeat at Worcester in 1651, Charles hid in an oak tree at Boscobel while Parliamentarian troops searched below - an episode remembered in the many 'Royal Oak' pub names.

Sir Robert Walpole, who led the government from 1721 to 1742, is generally regarded as the first holder of the office we now call Prime Minister - and he remains the longest-serving.

William Wilberforce led the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade for two decades, until it was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1807.

The Iron Bridge was the first bridge in the world to be made of cast iron, using iron produced in the furnaces of nearby Coalbrookdale.