Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Arts
Under Humanities College
Freelance work
Professin: Tourism explorer
Group: TBT-024 (11 years)
Course: II
Subject: English
Theme: Sports and games
Teacher: Elnura Jabbarli
Student: Leyla Afandiyeva
Sport is a form of physical activity or game. Often competitive and organized, sports use,
maintain, or improve physical ability and skills. They also provide enjoyment to participants
and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Many sports exist, with different participant
numbers, some are done by a single person with others being done by hundreds. Most sports
take place either in teams or competing as individuals. Some sports allow a "tie" or "draw",
in which there is no single winner; others provide tie-breaking methods to ensure one
winner. A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament format, producing a
champion. Many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a regular
sports season, followed in some cases by playoffs.
Sport is generally recognised as system of activities based in physical athleticism or
physical dexterity, with major competitions admitting only sports meeting this definition.
Some organisations, such as the Council of Europe, preclude activities without any physical
element from classification as sports. However, a number of competitive, but non-physical,
activities claim recognition as mind sports. The International Olympic Committee who
oversee the Olympic Games recognises both chess and bridge as sports. SportAccord, the
international sports federation association, recognises five non-physical sports: chess,
bridge, draughts, Go and xiangqi. However, they limit the number of mind games which can
be admitted as sports. Sport is usually governed by a set of rules or customs, which serve to
ensure fair competition. Winning can be determined by physical events such as scoring goals
or crossing a line first. It can also be determined by judges who are scoring elements of the
sporting performance, including objective or subjective measures such as technical
performance or artistic impression.
Records of performance are often kept, and for popular sports, this information may be
widely announced or reported in sport news. Sport is also a major source of entertainment
for non-participants, with spectator sport drawing large crowds to sport venues, and reaching
wider audiences through broadcasting. Sport betting is in some cases severely regulated, and
in others integral to the sport.
According to A.T. Kearney, a consultancy, the global sporting industry is worth up to $620
billion as of 2013. The world's most accessible and practised sport is running, while
association football is the most popular spectator sport.
The word "sport" comes from the Old French desport meaning "leisure", with the oldest
definition in English from around 1300 being "anything humans find amusing or
entertaining".
Other meanings include gambling and events staged for the purpose of gambling; hunting;
and games and diversions, including ones that require exercise. Roget's defines the noun
sport as an "activity engaged in for relaxation and amusement" with synonyms including
diversion and recreation. The singular term "sport" is used in most English dialects to
describe the overall concept (e.g. "children taking part in sport"), with "sports" used to
describe multiple activities (e.g. "football and rugby are the most popular sports in
England"). American English uses "sports" for both terms.
The precise definition of what differentiates a sport from other leisure activities varies
between sources. The closest to an international agreement on a definition is provided by the
Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF), which is the association for
all the largest international sports federations (including association football, athletics,
cycling, tennis, equestrian sports, and more), and is therefore the de facto representative of
international sport.
GAISF uses the following criteria, determining that a sport should:
have an element of competition
be in no way harmful to any living creature
not rely on equipment provided by a single supplier (excluding proprietary games such as
arena football)
not rely on any "luck" element specifically designed into the sport.
They also recognise that sport can be primarily physical (such as rugby or athletics),
primarily mind (such as chess or Go), predominantly motorised (such as Formula 1 or
powerboating), primarily co-ordination (such as snooker and other cue sports), or primarily
animal-supported (such as equestrian sport). The inclusion of mind sports within sport
definitions has not been universally accepted, leading to legal challenges from governing
bodies in regards to being denied funding available to sports. Whilst GAISF recognises a
small number of mind sports, it is not open to admitting any further mind sports.
There has been an increase in the application of the term "sport" to a wider set of non-
physical challenges such as video games, also called esports (from "electronic sports"),
especially due to the large scale of participation and organised competition, but these are not
widely recognised by mainstream sports organisations. According to Council of Europe,
European Sports Charter, article 2.i, "'Sport' means all forms of physical activity which,
through casual or organised participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness
and mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in competition at all
levels."
There are opposing views on the necessity of competition as a defining element of a sport,
with almost all professional sports involving competition, and governing bodies requiring
competition as a prerequisite of recognition by the International Olympic Committee (IOC)
or GAISF.
Other bodies advocate widening the definition of sport to include all physical activity. For
instance, the Council of Europe include all forms of physical exercise, including those
competed just for fun.
In order to widen participation, and reduce the impact of losing on less able participants,
there has been an introduction of non-competitive physical activity to traditionally
competitive events such as school sports days, although moves like this are often
controversial. In competitive events, participants are graded or classified based on their
"result" and often divided into groups of comparable performance, (e.g. gender, weight and
age). The measurement of the result may be objective or subjective, and corrected with
"handicaps" or penalties. In a race, for example, the time to complete the course is an
objective measurement. In gymnastics or diving the result is decided by a panel of judges,
and therefore subjective. There are many shades of judging between boxing and mixed
martial arts, where victory is assigned by judges if neither competitor has lost at the end of
the match time. Artifacts and structures suggest sport in China as early as 2000 BC.
Gymnastics appears to have been popular in China's ancient past. Monuments to the
Pharaohs indicate that a number of sports, including swimming and fishing, were well-
developed and regulated several thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt. Other Egyptian
sports included javelin throwing, high jump, and wrestling. Ancient Persian sports such as
the traditional Iranian martial art of Zoorkhaneh had a close connection to warfare skills.
Among other sports that originated in ancient Persia are polo and jousting. Various
traditional games of India such as Kho kho and Kabbadi have been played for thousands of
years. The kabaddi was played potentially as a preparation for hunting. A wide range of
sports were already established by the time of Ancient Greece and the military culture and
the development of sport in Greece influenced one another considerably. Sport became such
a prominent part of their culture that the Greeks created the Olympic Games, which in
ancient times were held every four years in a small village in the Peloponnesus called
Olympia. Sports have been increasingly organised and regulated from the time of the ancient
Olympics up to the present century. Industrialisation has brought motorised transportation
and increased leisure time, letting people attend and follow spectator sports and participate
in athletic activities. These trends continued with the advent of mass media and global
communication. Professionalism became prevalent, further adding to the increase in sport's
popularity, as sports fans followed the exploits of professional athletes – all while enjoying
the exercise and competition associated with amateur participation in sports. Since the turn
of the 21st century, there has been increasing debate about whether transgender sports
people should be able to participate in sport events that conform with their post-transition
gender identity. Sportsmanship is an attitude that strives for fair play, courtesy toward
teammates and opponents, ethical behaviour and integrity, and grace in victory or defeat.
Sportsmanship expresses an aspiration or ethos that the activity will be enjoyed for its own
sake. The well-known sentiment by sports journalist Grantland Rice, that it is "not that you
won or lost but how you played the game", and the modern Olympic creed expressed by its
founder Pierre de Coubertin: "The most important thing... is not winning but taking part" are
typical expressions of this sentiment. Key principles of sport include that the result should
not be predetermined, and that both sides should have equal opportunity to win. Rules are in
place to ensure fair play, but participants can break these rules in order to gain advantage.
Participants may cheat in order to unfairly increase their chance of winning, or in order to
achieve other advantages such as financial gains. The widespread existence of gambling on
the results of sports events creates a motivation for match fixing, where a participant or
participants deliberately work to ensure a given outcome rather than simply playing to win.
The competitive nature of sport encourages some participants to attempt to enhance their
performance through the use of medicines, or through other means such as increasing the
volume of blood in their bodies through artificial means. All sports recognised by the IOC or
SportAccord are required to implement a testing programme, looking for a list of banned
drugs, with suspensions or bans being placed on participants who test positive for banned
substances. Violence in sports involves crossing the line between fair competition and
intentional aggressive violence. Athletes, coaches, fans, and parents sometimes unleash
violent behaviour on people or property, in misguided shows of loyalty, dominance, anger,
or celebration. Rioting or hooliganism by fans in particular is a problem at some national
and international sporting contests/
Female participation in sports continues to rise alongside the opportunity for
involvement and the value of sports for child development and physical fitness. Despite
increases in female participation during the last three decades, a gap persists in the
enrollment figures between male and female players in sports-related teams. Female players
account for 39% of the total participation in US interscholastic athletics. Certain sports are
mixed-gender, allowing (or even requiring) men and women to play on the same team. One
example of this is Baseball5, which is the first mixed-gender sport to have been admitted
into an Olympic event. Youth sport presents children with opportunities for fun,
socialisation, forming peer relationships, physical fitness, and athletic scholarships. Activists
for education and the war on drugs encourage youth sport as a means to increase educational
participation and to fight the illegal drug trade. According to the Center for Injury Research
and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital, the biggest risk for youth sport is death or
serious injury including concussion. These risks come from running, basketball, association
football, volleyball, gridiron, gymnastics, and ice hockey. Youth sport in the US is a $15
billion industry including equipment up to private coaching. Disabled or adaptive sports are
played by people with a disability, including physical and intellectual disabilities. As many
of these are based on existing sports modified to meet the needs of people with a disability,
they are sometimes referred to as adapted sports. However, not all disabled sports are
adapted; several sports that have been specifically created for people with a disability have
no equivalent in able-bodied sports. Masters sport, senior sport, or veteran sport is an age
category of sport, that usually contains age groups of those 35 and older. It may concern
unaltered or adapted sport activities, with and without competitions.
The competition element of sport, along with the aesthetic appeal of some sports, result
in the popularity of people attending to watch sport being played. This has led to the
specific phenomenon of spectator sport.
Both amateur and professional sports attract spectators, both in person at the sport
venue, and through broadcast media including radio, television and internet broadcast.
Both attendance in person and viewing remotely can incur a sometimes substantial
charge, such as an entrance ticket, or pay-per-view television broadcast. Sports league
and tournament are two common arrangements to organise sport teams or individual
athletes into competing against each other continuously or periodically.
It is common for popular sports to attract large broadcast audiences, leading to rival
broadcasters bidding large amounts of money for the rights to show certain events. The
football World Cup attracts a global television audience of hundreds of millions; the
2006 final alone attracted an estimated worldwide audience of well over 700 million and
the 2011 Cricket World Cup Final attracted an estimated audience of 135 million in
India alone.
In the United States, the championship game of the NFL, the Super Bowl, has become
one of the most watched television broadcasts of the year. Super Bowl Sunday is a de
facto national holiday in America the viewership being so great that in 2015, advertising
space was reported as being sold at $4.5m for a 30-second slot. Sport can be undertaken
on an amateur, professional or semi-professional basis, depending on whether
participants are incentivised for participation (usually through payment of a wage or
salary). Amateur participation in sport at lower levels is often called "grassroots sport".
The popularity of spectator sport as a recreation for non-participants has led to sport
becoming a major business in its own right, and this has incentivised a high paying
professional sport culture, where high performing participants are rewarded with pay far
in excess of average wages, which can run into millions of dollars. Some sports, or
individual competitions within a sport, retain a policy of allowing only amateur sport.
The Olympic Games started with a principle of amateur competition with those who
practised a sport professionally considered to have an unfair advantage over those who
practised it merely as a hobby From 1971, Olympic athletes were allowed to receive
compensation and sponsorship and from 1986, the IOC decided to make all professional
athletes eligible for the Olympics, with the exceptions of boxing, and wrestling.
Technology plays an important part in modern sport. It is a necessary part of some sports
(such as motorsport), and it is used in others to improve performance. Some sports also
use it to allow off-field decision making.
Sports science is a widespread academic discipline, and can be applied to areas
including athlete performance, such as the use of video analysis to fine-tune technique,
or to equipment, such as improved running shoes or competitive swimwear. Sports
engineering emerged as a discipline in 1998 with an increasing focus not just on
materials design but also the use of technology in sport, from analytics and big data to
wearable technology. In order to control the impact of technology on fair play, governing
bodies frequently have specific rules that are set to control the impact of technical
advantage between participants. For example, in 2010, full-body, non-textile swimsuits
were banned by FINA, as they were enhancing swimmers' performances.
The increase in technology has also allowed many decisions in sports matches to be
taken, or reviewed, off-field, with another official using instant replays to make
decisions. In some sports, players can now challenge decisions made by officials. In
Association football, goal-line technology makes decisions on whether a ball has crossed
the goal line or not. The technology is not compulsory, but was used in the 2014 FIFA
World Cup in Brazil, and the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup in Canada, as well as in
the Premier League from 2013–14, and the Bundesliga from 2015–16. In the NFL, a
referee can ask for a review from the replay booth, or a head coach can issue a challenge
to review the play using replays. The final decision rests with the referee. A video
referee (commonly known as a Television Match Official or TMO) can also use replays
to help decision-making in rugby (both league and union). In international cricket, an
umpire can ask the Third umpire for a decision, and the third umpire makes the final
decision. Since 2008, a decision review system for players to review decisions has been
introduced and used in ICC-run tournaments, and optionally in other matches.
Depending on the host broadcaster, a number of different technologies are used during
an umpire or player review, including instant replays, Hawk-Eye, Hot Spot and Real
Time Snickometer. Hawk-Eye is also used in tennis to challenge umpiring decisions.
Research suggests that sports have the capacity to connect youth to positive adult role
models and provide positive development opportunities, as well as promote the learning
and application of life skills. In recent years the use of sport to reduce crime, as well as
to prevent violent extremism and radicalization, has become more widespread,
especially as a tool to improve self-esteem, enhance social bonds and provide
participants with a feeling of purpose.
There is no high-quality evidence that shows the effectiveness of interventions to
increase sports participation of the community in sports such as mass media campaigns,
educational sessions, and policy changes. There is also no high-quality studies that
investigate the effect of such interventions in promoting healthy behaviour change in the
community. sports is one of the important part of life
Benito Mussolini used the 1934 FIFA World Cup, which was held in Italy, to showcase
Fascist Italy. Adolf Hitler also used the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin, and the
1936 Winter Olympics held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, to promote the Nazi ideology of
the superiority of the Aryan race, and inferiority of the Jews and other "undesirables".
Germany used the Olympics to give off a peaceful image while secretly preparing for
war.
When apartheid was the official policy in South Africa, many sports people, particularly
in rugby union, adopted the conscientious approach that they should not appear in
competitive sports there. Some feel this was an effective contribution to the eventual
demolition of the policy of apartheid, others feel that it may have prolonged and
reinforced its worst effects.
In the history of Ireland, Gaelic sports were connected with cultural nationalism. Until
the mid-20th century a person could have been banned from playing Gaelic football,
hurling, or other sports administered by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) if she/he
played or supported Association football, or other games seen to be of British origin.
Until recently the GAA continued to ban the playing of football and rugby union at
Gaelic venues. This ban, also known as Rule 42, is still enforced, but was modified to
allow football and rugby to be played in Croke Park while Lansdowne Road was
redeveloped into Aviva Stadium. Until recently, under Rule 21, the GAA also banned
members of the British security forces and members of the RUC from playing Gaelic
games, but the advent of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 led to the eventual
removal of the ban.
Nationalism is often evident in the pursuit of sport, or in its reporting: people compete in
national teams, or commentators and audiences can adopt a partisan view. On occasion,
such tensions can lead to violent confrontation among players or spectators within and
beyond the sporting venue, as in the Football War. These trends are seen by many as
contrary to the fundamental ethos of sport being carried on for its own sake and for the
enjoyment of its participants. Sport and politics collided in the 1972 Olympics in
Munich. Masked men entered the hotel of the Israeli Olympic team and killed many of
their men. This was known as the Munich massacre.
A study of US elections has shown that the result of sports events can affect the results.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that
when the home team wins the game before the election, the incumbent candidates can
increase their share of the vote by 1.5 per cent. A loss had the opposite effect, and the
effect is greater for higher-profile teams or unexpected wins and losses. Also, when
Washington Redskins win their final game before an election, then the incumbent
president is more likely to win, and if the Redskins lose, then the opposition candidate is
more likely to win; this has become known as the Redskins Rule. Sport was an
important form of worship in Ancient Greek religion. The ancient Olympic Games were
held in honour of the head deity, Zeus, and featured various forms of religious
dedication to him and other gods.
The practice of athletic competitions has been criticised by some Christian thinkers as a
form of idolatry, in which "human beings extol themselves, adore themselves, sacrifice
themselves and reward themselves." Sports are seen by these critics as a manifestation
of "collective pride" and "national self-deification" in which feats of human power are
idolised at the expense of divine worship.
Tertullian condemns the athletic performances of his day, insisting "the entire apparatus
of the shows is based upon idolatry." The shows, says Tertullian, excite passions foreign
to the calm temperament cultivated by the Christian:
God has enjoined us to deal calmly, gently, quietly, and peacefully with the Holy Spirit,
because these things are alone in keeping with the goodness of His nature, with His
tenderness and sensitiveness. ... Well, how shall this be made to accord with the shows?
For the show always leads to spiritual agitation, since where there is pleasure, there is
keenness of feeling giving pleasure its zest; and where there is keenness of feeling, there
is rivalry giving in turn its zest to that. Then, too, where you have rivalry, you have rage,
bitterness, wrath and grief, with all bad things which flow from them – the whole
entirely out of keeping with the religion of Christ.
Christian clerics in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement oppose the viewing of or
participation in professional sports, believing that professional sports leagues profane
the Sabbath, compete with a Christian's primary commitment to God, exhibit a lack of
modesty in the players' and cheerleaders' uniforms, are associated with violence and
extensive use of profanity among many players, and encourage gambling, as well as
alcohol and other drugs at sporting events, which go against a commitment to
teetotalism.
Advantages of sports
Physical Fitness- Sports and games play a major rule in keeping a person fit and fine.
Furthermore, it increases the blood flow in the entire body. So this helps in keeping the
heart in the best condition. Moreover, the immunity of the body increases by playing
outdoor sports. Also, it helps in keeping your body fat percentage low. This makes the
appearance of the body better and makes a person good-looking.
Increase mental health- Games like chess, card games increase the mental health of a
person. As it develops Spontaneity and the response time of a person. As a result, a
person’s mind can make a decision under pressure. Thus this helps in increasing the IQ
of a person and its’ presence of mind.
Increase Stamina- Outdoor Sports like Football, cricket, basketball, swimming builds the
stamina of a person. As all these sports require a lot of running, the stamina of a person
automatically increases. Therefore a person can work for a longer period of time without
getting tired.
Builds a sense of teamwork- Some sports need individual participation, while some
require teamwork. Thus sports enlists teamwork in a person. Which is essential in every
fieldwork. A company can only run by working together and not individually. So it is
important for a person to know how to work together in a team. Only then you can
achieve the desired goal.
Stress-relieving- Sports can bring a change to your day to day routine. Moreover, it can
relieve you from stress as your body will experience a change. It gives your mind a
boost of enthusiasm and happiness. As a result, it will fill you with energy for the next
day.
LİTERATURE:
1. European Commission (2007), The White Paper on Sport.
2. Council of Europe (2001), The European sport charter.
