1. Hawaii, a group of nineteen islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, has been part of the United States since 1959. As all American schoolchildren could tell you, it was the 50th and most recent state to join the US, and is the only state that is completely surrounded by water.

2. Hawaii is a very long way from anywhere else, for example, it takes five hours to fly from Hawaii to the west coast of the US.

3. The islands are famous for being very beautiful, and receive a lot of visitors from all over the world. Surfing is one of the most popular things for tourists to do in Hawaii. If you’ve ever seen pictures of tiny-looking surfers moving very fast on enormous blue waves, there is a good chance they were from the north coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

4. Oahu, the most developed of the islands, contains the biggest cities and is home to 80% of Hawaii’s population. It is also the island where you will find Waikiki, Hawaii’s most famous beach.

5. The first European to arrive in Hawaii was probably the British explorer Captain Cook in 1778. At that time all the people of Hawaii were Polynesians, but in the nineteenth century white Americans began to arrive. Nowadays the population is around 1.2 million, and also contains large numbers of descendants of immigrants from Asian countries such as Japan, the Philippines and China.

6. Although English is the first language, the Hawaiian language still survives and all children now learn it at school. It is a complicated language for foreigners to learn because many words are not only very difficult to pronounce but are also extremely long. Take the reef triggerfish, a common fish that is one of Hawaii’s national symbols: its Hawaiian name is the humuhumunukunukuapua’a.

7. Anyone who has seen a film or TV programme set in Hawaii will know that Hawaiian men like to wear ‘aloha shirts’, which usually have a mixture of bright colours and unusual patterns (palm trees, for example). Most tourists leave Hawaii with at least one aloha shirt in their suitcases. The biggest British fan of the aloha shirt has got to be the famous DJ Fatboy Slim: he seems to have dozens, and most of them are as loud as his music.