Photos and illustrations combine to give a detailed picture of the fascinating life that goes on underground. We meet animals who live underground, see trains that travel underground and follow pipes, wires and cables from houses deep into the ground.

* Blue/ Band 4 non-fiction books use children's language patterns to give information which is supported by the illustrations and design.

* Text types - A non-chronological report.

* The cross-sectioned diagram on pages 14 and 15 allows children to recap and discuss the text.

* Curriculum links - Geography: the local area; Science: light and dark.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

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 16 pages in this book. This book was published 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Peter Bull graduated from art college in 1979 and has worked as a freelance illustrator for over 25 years. He creates both traditional and digital art for publishers worldwide, and also runs the Peter Bull Art Studio, based in Kent, UK, which he founded in 1975. Gill Munton is an experienced editor and writer of primary school material. She has written stories for reading schemes, workbooks, short stories and a number of differentiated texts, fiction and non-fiction. 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.