What's the tallest building in the world? How long did it take to build the Eiffel Tower? How have cars developed? Find out the answers and trace how designs have changed through the years and across the world in this visually stunning information book.

* Diamond/Band 17 books offer more complex, underlying themes to give opportunities for children to understand causes and points of view.

* Text type: An information book.

* The spider diagram on pages 54-55 shows how design affects all aspects of our lives and helps children to recap what they've read.

* Additional information retrieval devices such as a glossary and index can be evaluated for their usefulness as children develop critical reading skills.

* Curriculum links: Design and Technology: Shelters.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Diamond Series .

This book is aimed at children in primary school. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 56 pages in this book. This book was published 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Adrian Bradbury was born in Manchester and worked as a PE teacher before moving overseas to teach English in Europe, the Middle East and Far East. After returning to England he worked as Deputy Head in three schools and now divides his time between teaching and writing. As well as writing educational materials for HarperCollins and other publishers, he also writes humorous football books for children. His hobbies include playing the piano and all sports. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.