Title: otázka č
Author: Jan Veselý
Last saved by: k
Company: doma

otázka č.15
Sport and leisure activities 

People spend their time many ways. You can listen to music, watch TV, visit theater or cinema, play social games (like chess), visit pub with friends and on and on. Although many people are lazy and like passivity, the amount of people who do sports increases every year. 
Sport is a part of our lives because it is important in many ways and it is also fun. People do sports because it helps them to decrease daily stress level. It also radically helps our health. Thanks to activity people lose weight and built their condition. For pas ten years visiting fitness centers has been very popular. You can look around the city how many fitness centers are there. 
Through sport you can meet new people and even make lifetime friends. People challenge themselves and get to know more their body and what they are able to do when they exercise. Besides condition, which I mentioned, it can also help relax and for some people sport is a way of making a nice figure. So you see that there are many reasons why people do sports. 
It is popular to watch sports on TV. Sometimes it can be a kind of social event when people gather together in pub and watch a match of their favorite club or their national team. But you needn’t to stay at home, you can go visit a stadium and watch everything by your own eyes. 
Sport is a phenomenon. Professional sportsmen try to do their best and earn astronomic money if they do some popular sport and are good at it. But their pay for it the highest tax – their health. It is thought that sport on the top level destroys one’s health. Many sportsmen died because their heart failed. Doping is another story and con.  
We can divide sports into 3 groups according to number of players:
team sports: baseball, soccer, American football, hockey, basketball, cricket, handball, sailing, rugby, etc.
(+): less pressure, make many friends, you can still win if you are bad  
(-): jealousy (less noticed), competitive, more people (harder to get along), can make a very good performance and can still lose 

sports for 2-4 (contain sports when you play against opponent): tennis, wrestling, boxing, fencing (šerm), bobsledding, squash, table tennis, karate, judo, badminton
(+): not depend on anyone else (up to sport – not double in tennis, etc.), don’t have to submit to anyone else, can focus on yourself, you depend only on your performance
(-): teammates can help, don’t make many friends, training can be hard without teammate

solo sports: archery (lukostřelba), bowling, climbing, cycling, discus (hod diskem), golf, swimming, diving, javelin, skiing
(+) and (-) are the same as for sports for 2-4

Sports can be divided also whether are summer or winter.
There are another types playing-fields: court (tennis, volleyball), track (running), pool (swimming, diving), field (soccer, baseball), ice rink (hockey, figure skating), course (golf, skiing), rink (boxing), gym (gymnastic)

For each nation there are several sports at which they are good and which are popular in their country.
Czech: soccer (Pavel Nedvěd), ice-hockey (Jaromír Jágr), athletic (Roman Šeberle), cross-country skiing (Kateřina Neumannová)
British: soccer (David Beckham), rugby, polo, cricket
American: baseball, basketball, ice-hockey, American football, tennis (Andre Agassi) 

I am a sport type. I really like soccer and I played it for like 8 years, but I stopped to play it for a half year because of school. I hope that I‘m gonna start play it again. Besides that I visit fitness center and if I didn’t start to play soccer again, I would like to run to improve my condition. I think that sport is going to play an important role in my whole life.

some other non-mentioned sports: long jump, weight lifting, hurdles, sprint, speed skating, ski jump, rowing (veslování), skateboarding, surfing, etc.

equipment: arrow-bow-target, balance beam (kladina), bar bells (činka), bat, bike, goal, hoop (koš), hurdles, mat (žíněnka), oar (veslo), puck, racket, ski sticks-bindings, spikes (kopačky), swim suit-trunks, wire mask