Напишите 5 вопросов на английском по данному тексту, пожалуйста The London Underground map has a classic 20th Century design with a great history of its own. Although it was designed in the 1930s, the original is still used today with few modifications. Harry Beck, the designer of the map in 1933, was only paid five guineas for the job. The only official acknowledgment he received was a plaque at Finchley Station. The poor man worked on the map throughout his life, trying to improve and modify it, and that’s all the thanks he got… a plaque at Finchley Central Station.
His map was originally rejected by London Transport authorities, mainly because it was not geographical. Indeed he enlarged the central areas and compressed the outer areas to make the whole complex map clearer. The map proved to be a great hit with the public and most other major cities, including New York, St Petersburg and Sydney that used his map as the basis for their own underground maps.
Despite this fact, the map is often criticised as it has very little geographical relationship to where the stations are located and even less geographical information on how far apart they are. As Bill Bryson pointed out in his book, Notes From a Small Island, an out-of-town visitor using Mr Beck’s map to get from, say, Bank Station to Mansion House, would quite understandably board a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, transfer to the Circle Line and continue for another five stops to Mansion House. At which point they would emerge 200 yards down the street from the location they’d started at.
However, someone on the internet has kindly designed a real geographical tube map in order to avoid the described situation and also to try to stop the many tourists getting on at Covent Garden and travelling one stop to Leicester Square. This is only 0.16 miles on foot and is indeed the shortest distance between two stations on the whole network.
It’s also not clear how to use the map when trying to beat the world record for travelling around the entire London Underground system in a single day. The record for travelling to each one of the 282 stations is 19 hours, 59 minutes and 37 seconds. Some other forms of public transport that were used in this record were completed by Robert Robinson. He explained his success, not by using the map, but instead by knowing the tube like the back of his hand: “every single platform, every signal, every entrance and exit — everything.”
Someone has actually designed “The Way Out” tube map which is a pretty useful invention, since it shows where all the nearest exits are when you reach a station, allowing you to save valuable time (possibly whole minutes) off your journey.