Leisure and sports in Great Britain.

Great Britain is a country governed by routine. It has fewer public holidays than any other country in Europe. Among official holiday we can mention New Year, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Labour day, Christmas and Boxing Day.

Every average employee gets four weeks paid holidays a year. There are some ways of spending it. In the 18^th century there existed the fashion for seaside holidays. Soon it became normal for families to spend a week or two in a seaside resort town. The towns have hotels and boarding houses to stay in offering bed and breakfast or full board. Stereotypically daytime entertainment in sunny weather centers around the beach. For the evenings there are amusement arcades, bingo halls, dance halls, discos, theatres and so on.

Another popular holiday destination is the holiday camp. Both the types of holiday have become less popular in the end of the 20^th century.

Caravan holidays and package holidays become popular. Nowadays the British have more opportunity to go abroad. There are also many other extraordinary types of holiday: hiking in the country, potholing, a murder weekend and a variety of so-called working holidays – fruit packing and archaeological digging.

Weekends are usually spent in British pubs. The British pub is unique. It is the only indoor place where the average person can comfortably meet others and get into prolonged conversation with them. There are some other notable aspects about pubs. At first, that is the idea of tradition (the name with old-fashioned associations). But even old good pubs have to follow up-to-date fashion to survive. So we know that they served nothing but beer and spirits. These days you can get wine, coffee and some hot food with no waiter service.

As for food it has a strange unpleasant taste, their coffee is horrible, not because they prefer it in that way but because they don’t want to go to a café for a delicious cup of coffee – people just want to eat up quickly and aren’t interested much in quality. Besides they haven’t enough time to taste the food.

Though the quality of food doesn’t play an important role in people’s lives in Britain, sport does. Millions of British people take part in some kind of sport at least once a week. Many millions more are regular spectators and follow one or more sports. The most popular sports are football, rugby, tennis, boxing, hockey, basketball and others.

The importance of participation in sport has legal recognition in Britain. Every local authority has a duty to provide and maintain playing fields and other facilities including fitness clubs for obese people and those trying to keep themselves fit and healthy.

Spectator sport is also a matter of official public control. The most famous annual sporting occasions must be available to all TV channels.

Even if they aren’t taking part or watching, the British like to be involved in sport. They can do this by placing bets on future results. Gambling is widespread throughout all social classes. There are also bookmakers or turf accountants whose business is to take bets.

3.The moral values of the society you live in.

Moral values are the object of much distrust and thorny debate. But most people would admit that they are in some way important. Even the Youth of Today (YOT) would tend to agree, though our idea of morality may differ from that of our parents. At the heart of Moral Re-armament is a brief that each person can make a difference to the world through a transforming experience of liberation in their lives and through their interaction with others. People long to be themselves to have a sense of worth and purpose of life, to be able to contribute of their time and talent, to know that they are needed and loved. In an age of information it's possible to fool ourselves, succumb to peer pressure and the spirit of the age. There are to be checks and balances-moral standards of honesty, purity, selflessness which guide our motives. It's time for all countries to take a long hard look at themselves. Many of them are embroiled in a public debate about standards in public life, ethics in business values in education, values in the media and so on. It's because of the sort of the society we have created: a society which can produce the murder of a toddler: the massacreof infant-school children in Scotland and so on. Each of these events in isolation would have produced its own short-lived outcry. But what can be done? It would be easy to say it all began with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Easy but wrong. It was the sweeping reforms of the politicians. Its catchwords were “do your own things”. Morality was privatized. You could do what you wanted as long as you did not harm anyone else. Underlying all of this violence and civil disorders is the me-first philosophy which justifies all actions in terms of self-interest, rather than the common good. At the heart of these concerns lies the great issue of our time the dilemma between and constraints, rights and duties. Most pundits sum clear what is needed. A simple preposition might be for each of us to start with ourselves. If each person began with what they could do, to put things right and to set standards, then we might soon see a difference.

USA today is both a “salad bowl” and a “melting pot” of nations for all the diversity of cultures and their interrelations is represented in the country.

It was due to the contribution of every nationality, every individual who had ever inhabited the country that this unique and solid culture appeared, and because of this it can be called a “melting pot of nations”. And whatever imperfections or sins this culture be accused of, it still remains unique for there is no other example of a country in the world where one nation would imply a whole mixture of nationalities.

Even though nowadays the whole world tends to grow cosmopolitan, the USA remains still the best example of tolerance and homelike atmosphere for aliens.

If to turn to the ethnic make-up of the country, the number of the nationalities that constitute it is merely uncountable, with the descendants of British colonists being the largest one and as the result the most influential. It is them who “gave the new nation its language, laws, and philosophy of government”.

For centuries the most vivid example of such a deplorable discrimination was the state of the Native Americans and the blacks in their country. By the time colonization was over they counted in only several thousand. Neither the blacks felt at home being continuously humiliated end exploited. Undoubtedly the situation has changed today to a great extend if not to say reversed for the values of humanity have eventually prevailed over cruelty and discrimination. The needs of the formerly oppressed citizens of the USA are taken proper and thorough care of.

There are also other “ingredients” in the “salad bowl” of the American nation. These are Hispanics who “form the second largest cultural minority in the United States, after the nation’s 30 million blacks”. This group is actually quite diverse as it embraces the whole number of people of different nationalities — Cubans, Mexicans, South Americans, Puerto-Ricans, Brazilians and other. Though many of them have long ago become an integral part of the American culture, got assimilated, in general this group is still among those who are facing hardships, discrimination, sometimes even disdain. And many of them somehow fail to enter the society on equal terms with others. Though for that too there are reasons and explanations, the most common of which being “lower levels of education, difficulties with English”. It should be mentioned though that Cuban population, for example, is “largely middle-class. Many of these immigrants are educated people with backgrounds in professions or business. As a result, they have had more economic success in the USA than many other Hispanics”. Thus it proves to a certain extent the fact that it depends on the person himself if he manages to integrate in the society or not.

Apart from these large groups, the American nation is constituted of the whole range of other nationalities, less numerous but not less important. Basically a representative of almost every nation in the world can find his fellow countryman in America. Numerous Europeans, countless Arabs, multitude of Chinese and Japanese cohabitate and make up one nation, however different they all might be. Many of them even now stick to the traditions and customs that have been handed over to them by their ancestors. In the streets of big American cities one can easily meet an Indian or Arabian woman in their national dresses, a Jew in the traditional cap and some sort of frock and everybody is just glad to tolerate this, as one of the peculiar aspects of American life, as soon as it doesn’t come in contradiction with law, common sense and ideas of the nation. Otherwise it inevitably leads to misunderstanding on the both sides and as a result — to problems and conflicts which are hard to solve.

That is why American nation is not only a melting pot of different ethnicities, but also a “salad bowl” with some elements standing out from the crowd.

Today migration processes are a common thing. For example in 2004 an estimated 223000 more people migrated to the UK than migrated abroad. The same thing can be observed in the USA. So as a result, we can observe a great number of ethnic minorities on the territories of these countries.