Welcome to Mr Aslanov’s Lessons
QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS
Aslanovs_Lessons
TEST 2
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Activities for Children
A.
Twenty-five years ago, children in London walked to school and played in parks and playing fields
after school and at the weekend. Today they are usually driven to school by parents anxious about safety and
spend hours glued to television screens or computer games. Meanwhile, community playing fields are being
sold off to property developers at an alarming rate. ‘This change in lifestyle has, sadly, meant greater
restrictions on children,’ says Neil Armstrong, Professor of Health and Exercise Sciences at the University
of Exeter. ‘If children continue
to be this inactive, they’ll be storing up big
problems for the future.’
B.
In 1985, Professor Armstrong headed a five-year research project into children’s fitness. The
results, published in 1990, were alarming. The survey, which monitored 700 11-16-year-olds, found that 48
per cent of girls and 41 per cent of boys already exceeded safe cholesterol levels set for children by the
American Heart Foundation. Armstrong adds, “heart is a
muscle and need exercise, or it loses its strength.”
It also found that 13 per cent of boys and 10 percent of girls were overweight. More disturbingly, the survey
found that
over a four-day period, half the girls and one-third of the boys did less exercise than the
equivalent of a brisk 10-minute walk. High levels of cholesterol, excess body fat and inactivity are believed
to increase the risk of coronary heart disease.
C.
Physical education is under pressure in the UK – most schools devote little more than 100 minutes
a
week to it in curriculum time, which is less than many other European countries. Three European countries
are giving children a head start in PE, France, Austria and Switzerland – offer at least two hours in primary
and secondary schools. These findings, from the European Union of Physical Education Associations,
prompted specialists in children’s physiology to call on European governments to give youngsters a daily PE
programme. The survey shows that the UK ranks 13th out of the 25 countries, with Ireland bottom,
averaging under an hour a week for PE. From age six to 18 British children received, on average, 106
minutes of PE a week. Professor Armstrong, who presented the
findings at the meeting, noted that since the
introduction of the national curriculum there had been a marked fall in the time devoted to PE in UK
schools, with only a minority of pupils getting two hours a week.
D.
As a former junior football international, Professor Armstrong is a passionate advocate for sport.
Although the Government has poured millions into beefing up sport in the
community, there is less
commitment to it as part of the crammed school curriculum. This means that many children never acquire
the necessary skills to thrive in team games. If they are no good at them, they lose interest and establish an
inactive pattern of behaviour. When this is coupled with a
poor diet, it will lead inevitably to weight gain.
Seventy per cent of British children give up all sport when they leave school, compared with only 20 per
cent of French teenagers. Professor Armstrong believes that there is far too great an emphasis on team
games at school. “We need to look at the time devoted to PE and balance it between individual and pair
activities, such as aerobics and badminton, as well as team sports. “He added that children need to have the
opportunity to take part in a
wide variety of individual, partner and team sports.
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