Of the fifty states in the United States, the largest is Alaska and the
(1) smallest is Rhode Island. California has the biggest population (37 million); Wyoming has the smallest (550,000). The total US population is about 310 million.
(2) People in the United States consume more (3) chewing gum per head than in any other country - 300 pieces a year.
Barack Obama is, of course, the first black president of the United States. He is in one of the two (4) main political parties in the US, the Democratic Party. The
(5) person he beat to become the party’s candidate in 2008, Hillary Clinton, is now the US Secretary of State (or foreign minister, as (6) she would be called in many countries).
Many of the most (7) important singers and groups in the history of pop music have been American. The biggest-selling (8) male solo artist, for example, is Elvis Presley (or Michael Jackson, according to some statistics) and the biggest-selling female solo artist is Madonna.
There are around 1.5 million people in the US (9) military (army, navy and air force), and more than 350,000 of them are (10) outside the US. In fact, there are US military personnel in about 150 countries (although in most of these countries there are fewer than 1,000 of them).
The most popular spectator sports in the US are baseball, basketball and American football. (11) Fewer Americans watch football (or soccer, as the Americans call it) but a lot of them play it, and quite a high percentage of players are female. In fact, the US women’s soccer team is (12) number one in the world ranking and won the gold medal in both the last two Olympic Games.