sports
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
About Soccer
Association football, commonly known as football or soccer, is a sport played between two teams of eleven players with a spherical ball. It is the world's most popular sport.
The modern game was codified in England following the formation of The Football Association (FA), whose 1863 Laws of the Game created the foundations for the way the sport is played today. Football is governed internationally by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association ("International Federation of Association Football"), commonly known by the acronym FIFA. The most prestigious international football competition is the FIFA World Cup, held every four years.
About Ice Hockey
While there are 68 total members of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), 162 of 177 medals at the IIHF World Championships have been taken by seven nations: Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden and the United States.[1][2] Of the 64 medals awarded in men's competition at the Olympic level from 1920 on, only six did not go to the one of those countries. All twelve Olympic and 36 IIHF World Women Championships medals have gone to one of those seven countries, and every gold medal in both competitions has been won by either Canada or the United States.
About Baseball
Evolving from older bat-and-ball games, an early form of baseball was being played in England by the mid-eighteenth century. This game and the related rounders were brought by British and Irish immigrants to North America, where the modern version of baseball developed. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is now popular in North America, parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball, in contrast to the derivative game of softball.
About Golf
The origin of golf is unclear and open to debate. Some historians trace the sport back to the Roman game of paganica, in which participants used a bent stick to hit a stuffed leather ball. One theory asserts that paganica spread throughout Europe as the Romans conquered most of the continent, during the first century B.C., and eventually evolved into the modern game. Others cite chuiwan ("chui" means striking and "wan" means small ball) as the progenitor, a Chinese game played between the eighth and 14th centuries. A Ming Dynasty scroll dating back to 1368 entitled "The Autumn Banquet", shows a member of the Chinese Imperial court swinging what appears to be a golf club at a small ball with the aim of sinking it into a hole. The game is thought to have been introduced into Europe during the Middle Ages. Another early game that resembled modern golf was known as cambuca in England and chambot in France. This game was, in turn, exported to the Low Countries, Germany, and England (where it was called pall-mall, pronounced “pell mell”). Some observers, however, believe that golf descended from the Persian game, chaugán. In addition, kolven (a game involving a ball and curved bats) was played annually in Loenen, Netherlands, beginning in 1297, to commemorate the capture of the assassin of Floris V, a year earlier. According to the most widely accepted account, however, the modern game originated in Scotland around the 12th century, with shepherds knocking stones into rabbit holes on the current site of the Old Course at St Andrews.
Golf is a precision club-and-ball sport, in which competing players (golfers), using many types of clubs, attempt to hit balls into each hole on a golf course while employing the fewest number of strokes. Golf is one of the few ball games that does not require a standardized playing area. Instead, the game is played on golf "courses", each of which features a unique design, although courses typically consist of either nine or 18 holes. Golf is defined, in the rules of golf, as "playing a ball with a club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules." Golf competition is generally played for the lowest number of strokes by an individual, known simply as stroke play, or the lowest score on the most individual holes during a complete round by an individual or team, known as match play.
About Swimming
Types: The breastroke, butterfly, backstroke, freestyle and sidestroke are some of the most used and popular strokes. Benefits Certain swimming strokes are used for major competitions, as well as for exercise and leisure activities. Geography Swimming strokes have been invented everywhere including North America, Australia and Germany.
Features: Some features of swimming strokes are the sidestroke where the body is on the side and legs are doing the scissor kick, the backstroke where arms are used alternatively over the head while the swimmer is on her back, and the butterfly stroke where the arms are used together in a windmill type fashion and the legs are in a dolphin kick. Fun Fact The dog paddle, modeled after the way dogs swim, is considered to be the easiest stroke of all; and the freestyle stroke allows the swimmer to use any stroke in competition allowing only 15 meters of actual underwater time at the start of the race or from each turn that the swimmer does in the race.