Before purchasing a study text, students are advised to contact their Tuition Provider as many include the study text with the course fees. This ICSA Study Text has been written specifically for students preparing for the ICSA Certificate in Business Practice. It is keyed closely to the syllabus and includes a range of features to encourage active learning and to apply theory to real-life business situations. The materials are structured clearly to help in planning a programme of study, and include a range of case studies and questions to help students prepare for the case study-based examinations. Key learning features: Part opening case studies, with Putting the Case questions throughout each Part Test Yourself revision questions Stop and Think scenarios Making it Work cases Worked Examples showing questions and answers Definitions in the margins to explain key terms Each Part also ends with exam-style practice questions with suggested answers provided at the end of the text.

Britons and non-Britons alike often find it hard to grasp what Scotland is about. Are the Scots really just a sort of English? The answer is an emphatic ‘No’. Is Scotland a distinctive entity within Britain? ‘Yes’. Are the Scots British? ‘Sometimes’. Scotland and England share a language, a monarch (since 1603), and a parliament (since 1707), and they went through shared experiences of empire and industrial revolution. Yet many other aspects of their history have made them very different. George Orwell once wrote in ‘England, your England’: ‘National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with one another.’ The connections again lie in history. The social, political, and cultural characteristics of modern Scots come out of centuries of separate and parallel development within a British and European context. Theirs is a story of continuities and change, of consistency and contradiction, of good and bad, but what distinguishes Scotland is its experience of government, religion, law, education, social relationships, population mobility, and culture. Only by explaining and evaluating this history can we understand Scotland’s present.