Sports

Sports help us to keep our body in a good physical condition. They offer us relaxation and help to lose a few excess kilos.
Today positive attitude to sports is becoming a must. Young people, not just them, try to look sporty and attractive.
We go in for sports in various sportsgrounds, sportshalls, stadiums, tennis courts, golf courses and fitness centres.
Most of us are amateurs doing sports for pleasure. But some people, who achieve excellent results become proffessionals. They participate in international competitions, for example the Olympic Games. Each of them has got a couch.
In our PE lessons we practised athletics, but we also play different ball games, we did gymnastics and swimming.

Compare winter and summer, indoor and outdoor sports and games.
Among the summer sports belong : athletics( Marathon race, sprints, javelin throw, long jump, high jump, triple jump,...), then rowing, windsurfing, water skiing, motor-cycle racing and parachuting.
Among the winter sports belong : skiing, ice-hockey, ski jumping, snowboarding, figure-skating, ice-dancers, speed-skating.
In the last Winter Olympic Games, Židek was the silver-medal winner in the discipline – snowboard crossing.
Typical indoor sports are for example gymnastics, table tennis, basketball, wrestling, boxing, body-building and sport dancing.
Athletics is a typical outdoor sport as well as football, golf, sailing, yachting, diving, surfing/windsurfing, horse-racing, beach volleyball,....

Which do you prefer and why?
I prefer swimming because it helps me feel fit. In summer I always spend a lot of time near water. I swim, dive and jump. Water offers me a lot of pleasure.
In winter I´m fond of skiing. There is always a lot of snow in the High Tatras, my favourite place is Štrbské pleso where I usually stay at the Patria hotel.
The slopes Interski and Solisko are rather steep, but I´m quite a good skier. On the slopes you could see a great many of foreign visitors, mainly from Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine and Holland.

Why do people go in for sports?Give reasons.
Some people do sports since they want to be fit, other people do it for pleasure. But not everyone practises sports. Some people prefer sitting in front of the telly to sport activities. Those ones who do some kind of sport want to get rid of stress or they want to relax in an active way. But during adulthood people have less and less time and sport like other hobbies requires time. Study, work around the house and care of children, all take up more and more time. If we want to do some sports we have to organise our daily routine in such way that we will be able to find some time for sports as well.

Discuss the role of drugs in sport.
Some sportsmen take drugs since they want to be better than the others. They are determined to win whatever the cost. They realize that their experiments with drugs can seriously damage their health but fame and money dominate their life.

googles = protective glasses
kiln = vypaľovacia pec
magnifying glass = lupa
golf club = palica
tennis racquet = raketa
high diving = skoky do vody
cut throat work = zabíjacká práca
scholarship = štipendium
tution = výuka
put up with stress = znášať stres

The Olympic Games

The Olympic Games started in Olympia in Greece in 776 BC with only one race – sprint, for which the prize for the winner was an olive wreath.
They were probably a part of religious ceremony honouring the Greek God Zeus. The competitors used to run naked and barefoot.
The Roman Emperor Theodosius, a Christian, abolished them as a pagan ritual. The Olympic Games were revived in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Since that year, they have been for all mankind. They have been held every four years, always at a different location.
The first modern Olympic Games took place in Olympia in 1896. Twelve nations, besides Greece, participated. Nowadays, major cities compete to host the Olympic Games, not just for the honour the Games bring, but for the vast amount of profit a host country can make.
The Games have also become politically important. They can now be seen by nearly every country in the world and are therefore an ideal platform for political statements.

Extreme sports

People seem to get bored very easily nowadays. That´s probably the reason why they try to find more adventurous fun. They want to test their courage, to show off themselves, to do something dangerous. Shivering, as your fear and self-preservation control your body, you do what you are expected to – to overcome your fear and defeat the obstacle. Doing extreme sports need practise and a calm mind. You want more, you want to try every obstacle, and you want to overcome your fear once again. Adrenaline is being oumped into your blood n an overdose, your heart beating hastily, but you are goind to do it. It can be very expensive because you usually need special equipment and a couch. But fear makes your brain working.

My attitude to sports

Sports and games have always played an important role in my life. Since my early childhood I was keen on such sports as running, swimming and skating. I used to go cycling almost every day in summer with my parents and their friends.
Later I became more interested in dancing and ball games. As I was growing taller and taller, volleyball and skiing attracted me. I love going to the mountains where I have a great opportunity to ski. There is always a lot of snow in the Alpes where we go skiing every winter. The slopes are rather steep but I´m quite a good skier. I do sports just for fun and pleasure.
As for watching sports, I like to go to see the matches of our ice-hockey team and besides that there is always something on TV like tennis tournaments or world championships in all kinds of sports and games.

Doping

Doping in sports is nothing new, but it has grown, expanded geographically and become more visible in recent years. It is a true scourge of many competitive sports and jeopardises the health of millions of young athletes throughout the world.
Doping is the use of a substance or method which is potentially dangerous for the health of sportsmen but is able to improve their performance giving them an advantage over their opponents.
Sportsmen are idols to small children and if they take drugs, it certainly is a bad role model for all young sportsmen and sportswomen. It is not healthy, in fact it is very dangerous to the human body when abused. It is also unfair to the other people who try to be the best without any support of drugs.
Doping is very dangerous for the human body. There is a very fine line between supportive substances (ion drinks, vitamins, food suplements,..) and drugs (anabolic steroids,..). While the supportive ones can help us be healthier, the latter damage the health, actually every part of the human body. In women, the skin loses its flexibility and resilience, masculine hairs appear, the white of the eye turns to yellow, the voice falters, hair loses its quality and tends to fall out. Blood pressure rises, which can lead to a heart attack. It also damages the liver, kidneys and digestive system. Genitals are likely to be damaged, too. It means that one loses his libido, in women it can cause a disorder of their menstruation, which can be a reason of sterility.
In the past there were some cases of sportsmen dying because they took a drug that should have helped them to be better, stronger, more concentrated and so on. But their heart was under such pressure, it was not able to bear it, and collapsed.

Ice hockey

Ice hockey originally came from Canada, where garbage men played game with a broom and cans or other garbage.
Ice hockey is playes by two teams of six players on an ice rink, with a goal net on each end. The main objective of this very fast and dangerous game is to hit a rubber puck into the opposing team´s net with an ice hockey stick. The game begins when the referee drops the puck between the sticks of two players from the opposing teams. This is called a face-off.
An ice hockey rink is divided into three areas: defending, neutral and attacking. There are many other marks in the ice rink so the game has quite complicated rules. Players can move from one zone to another, but cannot pass the puck across more than two zones. A goal is scored when the puck crosses a goal line.
Each game consists of three periods of 20 minutes, divided by breaks or intermissions of 15 minutes. Both teams can use 20 players for every game, but only 6 can play on the ice rink. The game is watched by three referees, and there is also a goal judge behind each goalkeeper, who judges whether the puck has crossed the goal line or not, by turning on a red or green light.

Golf

The game of golf was first played in Scotland some four hundred years ago.
Players are required to hit a ball, using a wooden or iron golf club, from a teeing ground, down to a fairway, and on to a putting green, where the target hole is located. The fairway is a strip of clear land, along which there are natural hazards – such as ponds and streams, man-made hazards – such as bunkers (sand pits), and rough (areas of uncut grass). Championship golf courses have 18 holes.

The object of the game is to hit the ball into each hole in turn and to complete the round usingas few strokes as possible. Players compete individually or in teams, playing the course together in groups of two, three or four. The two basic forms of competition are match play and stroke play. In match play, the side winning the majority of holes over a certain number of rounds wins the match. In stroke play, the winner is the player who finishes a certain nimber of rounds having made the fewest strokes.

Swimming

Swimming already was highly esteemed in ancient Greece and Rome. No other form of exercise uses so many muscles in the body so fully.
The crawl is the fastest swimming stroke. It is also known as freestyle because it is the stroke of choice in freestyle competition. The alternating arm backstroke was first used in the 1912 Olympic Games. The breaststroke is the oldest style of swimming and it is the slowest competitive stroke. Te butterfly was developed in 1930. The sidestroke was the basic stroke in the early years of competition. Now it is used only in non-competitive swimming. It is efficient and allows the swimmer to cover long distances without tiring. The face remains out of the water at all times, which permits the swimmer to breathe naturally.

Amateurs and professionals

We usually exercise when we want our body to be healthy, to get rid of stress or to relax in an active way. Most of us are amateurs, doing sports for pleasure. Achieving excellent results, some people stop being amateurs and become professionals which means they get paid to do a sport. They have to work very hard because they attend many competitions and the main goal is to win. While some sportsmen dream of winning the world championships or an Olympic medal, tennis players attend tournaments at Wimbledon or Flushing Meadow.

Fans

There is another group of people involved in sport – the fans. Many of them are not keen on doing any physical activity regularly but love watching sporting events, either on TV or at the stadium. When there is an important sporting event, like a world championship, the streets are almost empty. People go home or to the stadium to watch their favourite sportsman or their national team. At the stadium (and after the match), they carry their national or team flag and sing songs to support their team and help them win the match.