Americans' interest in sports seems excessive to many foreign visitors. Television networks spend millions of dollars arranging to telecast sports events. Publications about sports sell widely. In the US professional athletes can become national heroes.

Sports are associated with educational institutions in a way is unique. High schools have coaches as faculty members, and school teams compete with each other. Nowhere else in the world are sports associated with colleges and universities in the way they are in the States. College sports, especially football, are conducted in an atmosphere of intense excitement and pageantry....

The biggest country in the world offers a striking variety of landscapes and weather conditions. Here you can find arctic zones, covered with ice and snow all-year round, huge virgin pine forests, inaccessible rugged mountains, endless plains and sandy beaches with lush subtropical vegetation. This diversity creates opportunities for almost all known sports activities – from swimming and watersports at the seaside through hiking and cycling along the roads that reach the horizon to skiing in all seasons in Siberia and the Caucasus Mountains. Cruising is also very attractive to tourists in Russia, as it allows them to explore some of the most beautiful and important cities and cultural sites in the world...

People all over the world are fond of sports and games. Sport makes people healthy, keeps them fit, more organized and better disciplined. It unites people of different classes and nationalities.

Many people do sports on their personal initiative. They go in for skiing, skating, table tennis, swimming, volleyball, football, bodybuilding, etc. All necessary facilities are provided for them: stadiums, sport grounds, swimming pools, skating rinks, skiing stations, football fields. Sport is paid much attention to in our educational establishments. Gymnastics is a part of children's daily activity in the kindergartens. Physical culture is a compulsory subject at schools and colleges....

If you want to keep fit you must go in for one kind of sport or another.

Sport is an essential part of my daily life. Every morning all the year round I do my morning exercises. Almost every day I do some training. In summer I go swimming or rowing. During my summer holidays I go on hikes. I usually spend my winter holidays in the country where I ski, skate or toboggan.

I also go in for track-and-field (athletics) events. Different sports and games are popular with my classmates. All my friends go in for different kinds of sport, such as water polo, gymnastics,...

A lot of Australians think you shouldn't worry too much about life.

But some things in life are really important, and to many Australian men, one of these things is sport. It's something they don't joke about. Sport matters. In pubs, clubs and even at work you'll often find men who can talk about only one thing — sport.

Australians are lucky. They have a perfect climate, and an endless amount of land. They have wonderful waves f 01 surfers on their beaches. They also have a strong wish to win. Put these together and you get a lot of good sportsmen and women. In fact, Australia has a very high number of world champions, in all kinds of sports, for a country of only 16 million people...

There are many public houses in London and elsewhere, where beer, wine and spirits may be bought and drunk at certain times of the day. These are suitable for all classes of the community and provide a place, where people may meet together and talk, and perhaps play at darts or other games, as well as drink....

They say, "Health is above wealth." One of the first duties we owe to ourselves is to keep our bodies in perfect health. If your body suffers from any disorder, our mind suffers with it, and we are unable to make much progress in knowledge, and we are unfit to perform those duties, which are required of us in social life.

There are certain laws of health which deserve particular attention and they are so simple that even a child can learn them. A certain amount of exercise is necessary to keep the body...

Snowboarding is the fastest growing winter sport and is set to become even more popular than skiing. It is hard to say who actually "invented" the first snowboard because it was influenced by many different people including Sherman Poppen, Demetrije Milovich, Tom Sims and Jake Burton Carpenter. Snowboarding's roots, however, may be traced back to the early 1920's. Then children in Vermont built what would now be considered makeshift snowboards out of barrel staves and rode them sideways down a snowy hill....

Skiing is the most popular of all winter sports. It is believed that skiing comes from northern Europe and Siberia, where it was a vital means of transportation during the long, snowbound months of winter. The pre-historic people of these regions used skis to keep hunters on top of the snow. Wooden planks were strapped to feet, to prevent sinking and making it possible to glide over the snow and travel faster. Skiing was such an important way of life in Scandinavia that the Vikings worshipped Ull and Skade, the god and goddess of winter/skiing. The first written account of skiing appears circa 1000 A.D. in the Viking "Sagas" where several kings are described as being superb skiers....

There are all kinds of racing in England - horse-racing, motor-car racing, boat-racing, dog-racing, and even races for donkeys. On sports days at school boys and girls run races, and even train for them. There is usually a mile race for older boys, and one who wins it is certainly a good runner. Usually those who run a race go as fast as possible, but there are some races in which ...