Hi there!
My name’s Ruslan, and I live in Kharkiv. When I was eighteen years old I was lucky to go to the USA as a foreign exchange student. I spent about eleven months in a small town in California and it was a great experience!
When I came back to Ukraine, everybody asked me something like, “Tell us about America!” People asked about food, about school, about what my host family was like, and so on and so forth. But there was one common question people asked, especially my friends, “What are American teenagers like?” A question that’s good and not quite easy to answer! So, I’m going to try to tell you about the teens’ “hard life” in America.
Americans love sports. I didn’t know a single guy who wasn’t interested in one of these: football (American, of course), basketball or baseball. Those are the most popular sports; well, at least that’s what it seems like to me. Besides watching all kinds of games on TV, you could join a sports club on campus. By the way, it’s probably the best way to make friends at school. I know it from my own experience, because probably one third of the friends I made I had first met in my bodybuilding class.
There were about seventeen sports clubs in our school and all of them were popular with the students. The American schools have tennis, swimming, water polo, volleyball, trackandfield activities and all that stuff. The good thing also is, you don’t have to buy your own sports equipment, because such things as tennis rackets, football uniforms, etc. are not cheap at all. They usually give them to you for free.
Our basketball and football teams had a game just about every week. Some of the games drew a huge crowd. Everybody went crazy cheering up the teams — shouting, dancing, jumping … Besides ordinary fans, there were cheerleaders — the girls who were on the cheerleading team. Their “job” is being a sports fan. They were all dressed in the same red and white skirts and jackets and danced pretty well — all that was supposed to make better chances for our teams to win! And it worked sometimes either! Being an active sports fan sure is an important part of American teenagers’ life. Some people even think it’s far too important: a great many students go to school just because of sports, it seems they don’t even know what the main purpose of school is.
Complete the sentences.
1. Ruslan left for the USA when I was 18
2. Most of all people were interested ...
3. The best way to make friends at school is ...
4. Sports equipment is
5. Fans usually go ...
6. Cheerleaders usually ...
