Devon has its own flag. It is linked to St Petroc, who is a local saint with links to Devon and nearby counties. The flag was chosen after winning a competition on the BBC Devon website in 2003.
Devon is less wealthy than many parts of England, for example the south east. This is because the traditional industries of Devon, for example fishing, mining and farming are declining. The European Union has given parts of Devon help (Objective 2). For example, grants of money have been given to help new industries grow. Tourism has become more important recently as a part of the economy of Devon.
An epidemic of Foot and Mouth disease in 2001 led to many farmers losing their cattle, so they lost a lot of money. Other industries also lost a lot of income because of this.
The main city of Devon is Plymouth. Exeter is where the county council is based. The county of Devon is split up into districts. Each district is run by a district council. Some things are the job of the county council and others are the job of the district council. There are also smaller town and parish councils inside the districts.
Plymouth and Torbay are not run by the county council, but have their own special councils. These councils do the jobs of both a county and a district council. These type of areas are called "unitary authorities".
The numbers on the map are linked to the numbers below.
This is a list of the main towns and cities of Devon:
"Note: The links below are not in simple English."
Latin script
Latin or Roman script, is a writing system used to write many modern-day languages. It is the most used writing system in the world today. It is the official script for nearly all the languages of Western Europe and of some Eastern European languages. It is also used by some non-European languages such as Turkish, Vietnamese, Malay language, Somali, Swahili and Tagalog. It is an alternative writing system for languages such as Serbian and Bosnian.
The alphabet is a writing system which evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet. It was the Etruscans who first developed it after borrowing the Greek alphabet, and the Romans developed it further. The sounds of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained and several writing styles ('hands') developed. Two such styles were combined into one script with upper and lower case letters ('capitals' and 'small letters'). Modern capital letters differ only slightly from their Roman counterparts. There are few regional variations.
The Latin alphabet used by the Romans:
The modern version of the alphabet is used for writing many languages. Indo-European languages, especially those of Western Europe, are mostly written with the Latin alphabet. These languages include the Germanic languages (which includes English, German, Swedish, and others) and the Romance languages (which includes French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and others). There are of course Indo-European languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, like Greek and Russian, as well as non-Indo-European languages that do, like Vietnamese.
Nearly all languages using the Roman alphabet include diacritics, which are symbols found above or below the letters. They are used for things such as tones and pronunciation. English is the only major European language that does not have any of these marks, at least not for native words. Words taken from other languages sometimes use diacritics to make clear the correct pronunciation.
The basic alphabet uses the following letters:
The Roman script has fewer letters than the sounds in some of the languages that use it. Some languages make up for the lack of letters by using diacritic marks, such as ă, â, á, é, í, î, ó, ẹ, ị, ọ, ụ, ã, ả, ẻ, ỉ, ỏ, ủ, ñ, č, ď, ě, í, ň, ř, š, ș, ť, ț, ú, ů, ž and đ. In effect, this increases the number of letters in their alphabet. Languages which use "some" of these characters are French, Czech, Polish, Magyar (Hungarian), Romanian, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Esperanto, and Igbo.
Many languages changed their writing systems to the Latin script. In some countries, Europeans made native people use it. The Vietnamese language was written in Chinese characters, and there is a Chinese-based Vietnamese writing system called chu nom. However, Chinese script requires a large number of characters to be learnt before a person is truly literate. The Vietnamese government switched to the Latin alphabet in the early 20th century so they could increase the country's literacy rates. The Vietnamese kept using the Latin alphabet even after independence since it was much faster to learn than Chinese characters (chu nom).
After the Russian Revolution, when the Russian Empire fell, the Latin alphabet in Turkic countries was started by Azerbaijan in 1918. When the Soviet Union broke up, some of its smaller languages began using the Latin alphabet. It is now used in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan. Kazakhstan announced in 2018 that the Latin alphabet would become the Kazakh language's main writing system.
Changing the way a language is written to Latin letters is called romanization. Many people who do not speak the language read a romanized version to know roughly how the words will sound, even if that is not the normal way to write the language. Some languages, like Chinese and Japanese, use the Latin alphabet in their languages so that they can be typed on a computer more easily. In mainland China, pinyin is the official romanization for Mandarin Chinese, and it is used to type Chinese characters on the computer by typing them phonetically. Even though many Japanese computers have kana keyboards to type Japanese on the computer, Japanese can also be typed using the Latin alphabet. Software called IME (input method editor) converts the Latin letters, called romaji in Japanese, into Japanese kana and kanji.
Insectivore
An insectivore is an animal or insect that eats mostly insects for food. An Anteater is an animal that eats ants. Insectivorous plants also eat insects. The Venus fly-trap is one of them.
To eat insects for food is not very easy because insects are small. Large insect-eating animals must eat many of them. Anteaters eat hundreds of ants every day.
Some omnivores like humans and bears also eat insects for food. There was once a taxonomic group of mammals called Insectivora. Most of its animals are now called Eulipotyphla.
Copy
Copy means a thing that is made to look like another thing.
Vapor
Vapor (British English: vapour) is a mass of small drops of liquid which fly in the air, for example because the liquid has been heated.
The temperature at which each material turns into vapor is determined according to the air pressure.
Vehicle
A vehicle is a machine to move people and things. A vehicle is not alive. A horse can move people and things, but it is an animal, not a machine or a vehicle.
Some vehicles move on land. Most land vehicles have wheels. Examples of land vehicles are bicycles, cars, motorcycles, and trains.
Land vehicles that are powered by an engine or motor are called motor vehicles.
Some land vehicles, like tanks and snowmobiles, have tracks. These tracks look and work like conveyor belts.
Some vehicles move on, or in, the water. Examples are boats, ships, and submarines.
Vehicles that move in the sky are called aircraft. Examples are aeroplanes and balloons.
Some vehicles, like the Space Shuttle, can even leave the Earth's orbit and go to outer space.
Vehicles can be propelled by various sources of energy.
Line dance