Europa

Europa commonly refers to:

Europa may also refer to:

Mythical characters

People

Places

Christopher Paolini

Christopher Paolini (born November 17, 1983, Los Angeles, California) is an American author. He is best known as the author of the Inheritance Cycle, which consists of the books Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr and Inheritance. He lives in Paradise Valley, Montana, where he wrote his first book.

Biography

Christopher James Paolini was born in Southern California and raised in the area of Paradise Valley, Montana. His family members include his parents, Kenneth Paolini and Talita Paolini, and his younger sister, Angela Paolini.Homeschooled for the duration of his education, Paolini graduated from high school at the age of 15 through a set of accredited correspondence courses from the American School of Correspondence in Lansing, Illinois. Following graduation, he started his work on what would become the novel Eragon, the first of a series set in the mythical land of Alagaesia.

In 2002, Eragon was published by Paolini International LLC, Paolini's parents' publishing company. To promote the book, Paolini toured over 135 schools and libraries, discussing reading and writing, all the while dressed in "a medieval costume of red shirt, billowy black pants, lace-up boots, and a jaunty black cap." He drew the cover art for the first edition of Eragon, which featured Saphira's eye, along with the maps on the inside covers of his books.

Lyon

Lyon or Lyons (UK /liːˈɒn/ or /ˈliːɒn/;French pronunciation: [ljɔ̃], locally: [lijɔ̃]; Arpitan: Liyon [ʎjɔ̃]) is a city in east-central France, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. The correct spelling in French is Lyon, but the spelling Lyons is sometimes specified in English, particularly in newspaper style guides. Lyon is located about 470 km (292 mi) from Paris, 320 km (199 mi) from Marseille, 420 km (261 mi) from Strasbourg, 160 km (99 mi) from Geneva, and 280 km (174 mi) from Turin. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais.

The municipality (commune) of Lyon has a population of 500,715 (2013) and is France's third-largest city after Paris and Marseille. Lyon is the seat of the metropolis of Lyon, and the capital of both the department of Rhône and the region of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. The greater metropolitan area of Lyon, a concept for statistical purposes that is not an administrative division, has a population of 2,214,068 (2012), which makes it the second-largest metropolitan area in France after Île-de-France (Paris).

Europe

Europe (ⁱ/ˈjʊərəp/ or /ˈjɜːrəp/) is a continent that comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. To the east and southeast, Europe is generally considered as separated from Asia by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. Yet the borders of Europe—a concept dating back to classical antiquity—are arbitrary, as the primarily physiographic term "continent" also incorporates cultural and political elements.

Europe is the world's second-smallest continent by surface area, covering about 10,180,000 square kilometres (3,930,000 sq mi) or 2% of the Earth's surface and about 6.8% of its land area. Of Europe's approximately 50 countries, Russia is by far the largest by both area and population, taking up 40% of the continent (although the country has territory in both Europe and Asia), while Vatican City is the smallest. Europe is the third-most populous continent after Asia and Africa, with a population of 739–743 million or about 11% of the world's population. Europe has a climate heavily affected by warm Atlantic currents, tempering winters and enabling warm summers on most of the continent, even on latitudes that have severe climates in North America and Asia. Further from the Atlantic, seasonal differences increase, but the mildness of the climate remains.

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consensus as to the precise area it refers to, partly because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic connotations. There are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region". A related United Nations paper adds that "every assessment of spatial identities is essentially a social and cultural construct". One definition describes Eastern Europe as a cultural (and econo-cultural) entity: the region lying in Europe with main characteristics consisting in Byzantine, Orthodox, and some Turco-Islamic influences. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc. A similar definition names the formerly communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Historians and social scientists increasingly view such definitions as outdated or relegating, but they are still heard in everyday speech and used for statistical purposes.