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  3. Sports Many animals engage in play, but homo sapiens is the only animal to have invented sports. Since sports are an inventi

Sports Many animals engage in play, but homo sapiens is the only animal to have invented sports. Since sports are an inventi

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问题                                              Sports
    Many animals engage in play, but homo sapiens is the only animal to have invented sports. Since sports are an invention, a part of culture rather than an aspect of nature, all definitions of sports are somewhat arbitrary. Whether sports are a human universal found in every known culture or a phenomenon unique to modern society depends upon one’s definition of sports. Men and women have always run, jumped, climbed, lifted, thrown, and wrestled, but they have not always performed these physical activities competitively. Although all literate societies seem to have contests of one sort or another in which men, and sometimes women, compete in displays and tests of physical skill and prowess, sports may be strictly defined as physical contests performed for their own sake and not for some ulterior end. According to this strict definition, neither Neolithic (新石器时代的) hunters nor contestants in religious ceremonies such as the ancient Olympic Games were engaged in sports. Insistence on the stipulation that sports must be performed for their own sake means the paradoxical elimination of many activities which are usually thought of as sports, such as exercises done for the sake of cardiovascular fitness, races run to satisfy a physical education requirement, ball games played to earn a paycheck. Strict definition also means abandonment of the traditional usage in which "sport", derived from Middle English disporter, refers to any lighthearted recreational activity. In the minds of some 18th-century aristocrats, a game of backgammon (15子游戏) and the seduction of a milkmaid were both considered good sport, but this usage of the term has become archaic.
    Strict conceptualization allows the construction of an evolutionary history of sports in which extrinsic political, economic, military, and religious motivations decrease in importance as intrinsic motivations—participation for its own sake—increase. The disadvantage, however, is that the determination that a given activity is truly a sport depends on the answer to a psychological question: What is the motivation of the participants? The question of motivation cannot be answered unambiguously. It is probable that the contestants of the ancient Olympic Games were motivated by the intrinsic pleasure of the contest as well as by the religious imperatives of Greek cult. It is also probable that modern professional athletes are motivated by more than simply economic motives. Thus most scholars assume quietly that popular usage cannot be completely wrong to refer, for instance, to U. S. professional National Football League games as sports.
    The psychological aspects of sports are more difficult to assess because factors such as motivation are more difficult to measure than the size of audience or the amount of a contract. The psychological tests that have been administered have produced such a welter of contradictory results that many specialists are ready to abandon the attempt to pinpoint motives. Some generalizations, however, seem tenable. On the whole, physical fitness and the desire for simple relaxation seem to motivate those who shun competitive sports in favour of noncompetitive physical activities such as jogging, hiking, recreational swimming, and aerobics (although the development of aerobics contests testifies to the protean (变化多端的) nature of the competitive urge). Important to those who choose sports is the challenge of the contest, the opportunity to test one’s physical and mental skills against another person, against nature, or against the abstraction of the sports record. The choice of one sport over another depends on the cultural availability of the sport (few Laotians play baseball), on social group (few truck drivers own polo ponies), on gender (women are not supposed to box), and on individual temperament (some people cannot enjoy golf). There is reason to believe that the distinction between team sports, which emphasize cooperation within the contest, and individual sports, which call for a greater sense of autonomy, is a fundamental one, although an individual may enjoy both.
    The will to win is a powerful motive, and individual athletes as well as coaches and administrators have studied such matters as the most efficient type of leadership and the optimal level of pregame stress. Psychologists differ among themselves, but some contend that democratic leadership produces greater individual satisfaction while authoritarian leadership provides "results" (i. e. , a higher level of achievement and, consequently, more victories). Many psychological studies have shown that female athletes tend to attribute failure to their lack of effort or skill while male athletes point to external factors such as luck or the strength of the opposition. It has also been established that the ideal level of pregame stress falls between utter relaxation and hypertension and depends in part on the sport; successful archery, for instance, calls for less pre-match aggressiveness than rugby does. Athletes in many sports such as golf, tennis, diving, high jumping, and pole vaulting, where form and timing are crucial, often resort to a different method of pregame "psyching" called imaging or visualizing. This does not so much build aggressiveness as write a visual mental script to be followed in the contest to come.
    Induced aggressiveness is, of course, a common technique, but "psyched-up" players can be a menace to themselves and others. Injuries are but one consequence. As the desire to win increases in intensity, especially when the players symbolically represent schools, cities, nations, races, religions, or ideologies, considerations of fair play are liable to be lost in the scuffle (扭打). In such situations, aggressiveness on the field is often accompanied by violence in the stands, where crowd psychology operates (often in conjunction with alcohol) to reduce normal inhibitions on rowdy behaviour.
    Sports-related spectator violence is, however, often more strongly associated with social group than with the specific nature of the sport itself. Roman gladiatorial (格斗的) combats were, for example, history’s most violent sport, but the closely supervised spectators, carefully segregated by social class and gender, rarely rioted. In modern times, association football is certainly less violent than rugby, but "soccer hooliganism" is a worldwide phenomenon, while spectator violence associated with the more upper-class but rougher sport of rugby has been minimal. Similarly, crowds at baseball games have been more unruly than the generally more affluent and better-educated fans of American football, although football is unquestionably the rougher sport. Efforts of the police to curb sports-related violence are often counterproductive because the young working-class males responsible for most of the trouble are frequently hostile to the authorities. Media coverage of disturbances can also act to exaggerate their importance and to stimulate the crowd behaviour simultaneously condemned and sensationalized, as is violence on the field. The frequent fights between U. S. National Hockey League players seem to be a consistent feature of sports highlights on television.
In the traditional usage, sports refer to ______ activities.
选项
答案lighthearted recreational
解析 文章第一自然段第八句strict definition also means abandonment of the traditional usage in which “sport...” refers to any lighthearted recreational activity，即是指轻松的消遣的活动。
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大学英语六级

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