The Role of Sports

For many people a fovourite way of spending their free time is lying on the beach, fishing, knitting, watching TV or reading. Others quickly get bored with such passive entertainment and prefer more active ways of spending their leisure hours. They go in for swimming, skiing, cycling or jogging.

It's generally known that people who do physical exercises keep fit and healthy. Sports and games can be of great value to people who work with their brains; to people who lead a sedentary lifestyle. Moreover taking up a sport has also many psychological benefits. Firstly, it relieves the stresses of everyday life and secondly, it helps individuals identify with a group and replace their loneliness with the security of belonging.

Besides, practising a sport is very useful for character-training. It helps young people to gain such virtues as discipline, perserverance and courage. But sport is not only a popular pastime and contest of human abilities but also a school of life. It's an excellent lesson of winning and losing and is what life is. We lose and win. If you can easily accept your losses, analyse their causes and go on working, next time there is a chance for you to be a winner.

Certainly people in Poland practise sport not too often. They tend to be plump and prefer passive participation in sports activities by watching sport on TV. The favourite Polish sport is football. We can also see football matches on stadiums but unfortunately it has become dangerous because of football-hooligans, who go out to fight in the streets with other fans as a pleasure.

Not all types of sports, however, are healthy and safe. Some of them can even be deadly dangerous and extremely risky, hence they are often called extreme sports.

The list of dangerous sports is quite long. They include boxing, motor racing, ice diving, bungee jumping and many others. Extreme sports can be very addictive. Once people have tried them, they never want to stop. They are like a drug for the brave: dangerous but pleasant and exciting.

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