Спереводом the capital of the usa is washington. it is situ¬ated in the district of columbia on the banks of the potomac river and is named after the 1st us president -george washington. there are many large cities in the country: new york, los angeles, chicago, philadelphia, detroit, san-francisco, cleveland and some others. the united states of america is a federal state, headed by the president. according to the us constitution the powers of the government are divided into 3 branches: legislative, executive and judicial. the legislative power belongs to the congress consist-ing of the senate and the house of representatives. the senate represents the states while the house of repre¬sentatives - the population. the executive power be¬longs to the president and his administration (vice-president and cabinet of ministers). the judicial power belongs to the supreme court and the system of federal, state and district courts. there are several political parties in the usa, the larg¬est of them are the republican (symbolized by a donkey) and the democratic (symbolized by an elephant). the usa is a highly developed industrial country. the transport network spreads into all sections of the country, but the web of railways and highways is much denser in the eastern half of the united states. in the early 1990s the united states had about 6.24 million km of streets, roads, and highways. the na-tional interstate highway system, 68,449 km in length in the early 1990s, connected the nation's principal cit-ies and carried about one-fifth of all the road and street traffic. more than 188 million motor vehicles were registered in the early 1990s. more than three-quarters were cars - one for every two persons in the country. about one-fifth of the vehicles were lorries. amtrak (the national rail¬road passenger corporation), a federally subsidized con¬cern, operates almost all the inter-city passenger trains in the united states; it carried more than 22 million pas¬sengers annually in the early 1990s.
