Australia

Australia is a large country lying between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. Land - 8 sq km. The population of the country 20 mln. The capital of the country is Canberra. The largest cities are Sidney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. The official language is English.

Most of Australia is a semi-desert. People cannot live where there is no water, and so most of the people in Australia live in the richer south-east.

The first Australian people were the dark-skinned Aborigines, and thought of coming of the white settlers destroyed their tribal lives, some 60 thousand still survive in Australia today. They account for about 1% (percent) of the population.

The first Europeans to land in this country were Dutch sailors who were blown off their course across the Indian Ocean. They were not impressed by that they found. It remained for Captain Cook, an Englishman, who arrived in 1770 to notice the possibilities of the new country. He hoisted The British Flag, and Australia was British after the American Revolution.

The British Government needed a place to send British prisoners. Captain Cook’s discovery was remembered. That 1 thousand people, 850 of them convicts, set sail in 1787 to start the first European colony in Australia.

The national holiday, Australia Day, is now celebrated on or near January 26^th in memory of the landing of the British in 1788. Explorers followed, and thought they discovered good, rich places to live in, they found minerals and they began to build new settlements. The young country grew very fast.

Today Australia is an independent federative state consisting of 6 states and 2 territories. It is a member of the Commonwealth headed by the British Queen.

Sports In The uk And The usa

Sport is a very important part of life in Great Britain. Thousands of people devote their leisure time to outdoor and indoor games, athletics, cycling, mountain climbing, boxing and other sports. Horse-racing, dog-racing and motor-racing are among the most popular sports in Britain. The most popular of the team games are football and cricket, and the most popular individual game is lawn-tennis.

Football: Rugby and Soccer. Englishmen played a kind of football in the middle Ages as an organized game in dates from just over a century ago.

One type of football, in which the players carried the oval ball in their hands, appeared in 1859. The rules of the game are different from football and there are 15 players instead of 11, in a team.

Soccer matches get big crowds. The Cup Final is always played at the Wembley stadium, near London.

Cricket is England’s national summer game. Nobody knows how old the game is but some form of cricket was being played in England in the 13^th century.

Most matches last one day, but important matches can last 6 days.

The oldest series of international matches is between England and Australia. The team that wins takes home a famous trophy called The Ashes. The Ashes is like winning the World Cup for football.

The number of people who play law tennis is great. The tennis championships held at Wimbledon for two weeks at the end of June and beginning of July are the main events of the lawn tennis season in Britain and, in fact, in the world. These championships gather large crowds.

Many children in Britain learn to swim at school, or during holidays at the seaside, and swimming as a pastime is enjoyed by millions of people. There is an also indoor swimming pool which makes swimming possible all-the-year round. Swimming championship and competition are widely reported in the press, over the radio and on television.

The 4 most popular sports in the USA are hockey, baseball, football and basketball. There are many other sports and sports activities which Americans like. Among them are golf, swimming, tennis, marathons, track-and-field, skiing, skating, squash and badminton, rowing and sailing, boxing and wrestling.

Football is a very popular outdoor team sport in the USA. American football is rather like rugby, played between two teams of 11 players using an oval ball that can be handled or kicked. But it still differs from European rugby and soccer. The difference is not only in the size, speed and strength of the players, but in the specific rules which the game has.

Baseball has a reputation of being a “typically American” sport. It is played with a wooden bat and hard ball by two teams of nine players. The game is played on a field with 4 bases at the corners of a square called a diamond. Each player from one team hits a ball with a bat and then tries to run round all 4 bases before the other team can get the ball back.

Basketball is American in origin. The first basketball game was played in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891. Basketball games in the USA are attended by large numbers of fans. There are basketball teams in almost all American schools and universities, and “shooting baskets” with friends is a pastime many young people like most.