Page 164 - DENG401_Advance Communication Skills

Unit 8: Comprehension

Notes
As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of playing the game according
to the rules always vanishes. People want to see one side on top and the other side
humiliated, and they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the
intervention of the crowd is meaningless. Even when the spectators don’t intervene
physically they try to influence the game by cheering their own side and ‘rattling’ opposing
players with boos and insults. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up
with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing
violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.
Instead of babbling about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part
played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to
inquire how and why the modem cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play, are
of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between
Roman times and the nineteenth century. The games were built up into a heavily-financed,
activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection
spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and
boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is
bound up with the rise of nationalism-that is, with the lunatic modem habits of identifying
oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.
Also, organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average
human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity
for creative labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his
surplus energy by walking, swimming, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various
sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In
a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one’s physical
strength or for one’s sadistic impulses.
(By George Orwell From: The Collected Essays, 1970)

Questions
1. What do you mean by:
(a) Mimic warfare
(b) Savage passion
(c) A confined life

2. In which way is international level sport mimic warfare?
3. Cite reasons as to why do organized James flourish in urban communities.
4. Bring out the merits and demerits of international level sport.

Nicola Iacocca, my father, arrived in this country in 1902 at the age of twelve-poor, alone,
and scared. He used to say the only thing he was sure of when he got here was that the
world was round. And that was only because another Italian boy named Christopher
Columbus had preceded him by 410 years, almost to the day.
As the boat sailed into New York Harbor, my father looked out and saw the Statue of
Liberty, that great symbol of hope for millions of immigrants. On his second crossing,
when he saw the statue again, .he was a new American citizen with only his mother, his
young wife, and hope by his side. For Nicola and Antoinette, America was the land of
freedom—the freedom to become anything you wanted to be, if you wanted it bad enough
and were willing to work for it.

Contd...

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