晨讀英語美文60篇03 X-Sports
The beauty industry
The one American industry unaffeted by the general depression of trade is the beauty industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the slump--about three million pounds a week. These facts and figures are 'official', and can be accepted as being substantially true.
The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have seen, they have not suffered.Women are retrenching on other things than their faces.
Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hithero reserved to the male, but also freer to exercise the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. The fortunes are made justly by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the sellers of rubber reducing-belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.
It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than inX-Sports
Rick Stevenson, 16 years old, spends every minute he can on the mountain. He and his friends go snow-boarding every weekend. “It's incredible,” he says. “The winds are so strong, the boards go 50 miles an hour.” His friend Laura Fields agrees. “No one goes skiing anymore,” she says.“That’s for the old folks.”
Rick and Laura are part of a new trend in sports. It has its own language, words such as “rage,” “juice,” and “energy.” It has its own clothing, such as skin-tight bicycle suits in rainbow colors or baggy tops and pants. And it’s not for the old or the easily frightened. Its philosophy is to get as close to the edge as possible. And more and more young athletes are taking part in these risky, daredevil activities called “extreme sports,” or “X-sports.”
In the past, young athletes would play hockey or baseball. Today, they want risk and excitement—the closer to the edge the better. They snowboard over cliffs and mountain-bike down steep mountains. They wind-surf near hurricanes, go white-water rafting through rapids, and bungy-jump from towers.Extreme sports started as an alternative to more expensive sports.
A city kid who didn’t have the money to buy expensive sports equipment could get a skateboard and have fun. But now it has become a whole new area of sports, with specialized equipment and high levels of skill.
There’s even a special Olympics for extreme sports, called the Winter X-Games, which includes snow mountain biking and ice climbing. An Extreme Games competition is held each summer in Rhode Island. It features sports such as sky surfing, where people jump from airplanes with surfboards attached to their feet.
What makes extreme sports so popular?
“People love the thrill,” says Murray Nussbaum, who sells sports equipment. "City people want to be outdoors on the weekend and do something challenging. The new equipment is so much better that people can take more risks without getting hurt.” An athlete adds, “Sure there’s a risk, but that’s part of the appeal. Once you go mountain biking or snowboarding, it’s impossible to go back to bike riding or skiing. It’s just too boring.”
Extreme sports are certainly not for everyone. Most people still prefer to play baseball or basketball or watch sports on TV. But extreme sports are definitely gaining in popularity. “These sports are fresh and exciting. It’s the wave of the future. The potential is huge,” says Nussbaum.the past. The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indisinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrai of the Artist's Daughter. The success is part due to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, and in part due to impoved health. So for some people, the campaign for more beauty is also a compaign for more health. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of heslth is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. Every middle-in-come preson can afford the cosmetic apparatus and more knowledge of the way in which real herlth can be achieved is being universally aced upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features? The answer is apparent: No,for real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self.
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