British and American culture
The birthplace of sport

Next in a series of articles on British and American culture.

The United Kingdom is the birthplace of sports like football, golf, boxing, rugby, cricket, hockey, polo, snooker, badminton and many others. In addition it provides the venue for tournaments such as the British Open (Golf) or Wimbledon (tennis tournament).

The king of sports

In Great Britain, each football match is played as if it were the last ever: people are passionate about their football. Each team has its nickname, its colours, its songs and … its merchandising.

What's cricket about?

Cricket is a bat and ball game. Each match is divided into innings. In an inning, one side bats and the other bowls. The batting side is the one who scores the runs. The bowling side tries to limit the number of runs scored and tries to catch out the batsmen from the other team. The innings finishes when the bowling team has caught out all ten batsmen from the opposing team. They swap sides with the bowling team becoming the batting team and vice versa. The side who scores the most runs wins. If cricket is related to another sport, it's baseball.

A gentleman's sport

The history of rugby begins in 1823 when, in a private college in the English town of Rugby, a group of students who were playing football were surprised when one of them picked up the ball and ran with it. Today, there is a commemorative plaque there and, after nearly two centuries, rugby is a sport which is played in over 140 countries.

Next in the series
Next month you can read about entertainment in London.

A Spanish language version of the text above is available in the 'Guía Cultural' section of Macmillan Diccionario Pocket, a brand-new bilingual English-Spanish/Spanish-English dictionary.
Spanish text written by Paz Blanco Castro
Translated into English by Sinda Lopez

If you would like to see a guided tour of Macmillan Diccionario Pocket on CD-ROM, download this file (SBCD.exe 1.95MB).