TOEFL Essay: Dangerous Sports
Created by Jeenn Lee Hsieh
读书人谢振礼海外投稿
》Why do you think that some people are attracted to dangerous sports or other dangerous activities? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Any dangerous sport is associated with causing injury or death. So why do it? Wondering why? Because you can! That's why some can-do men (and women) have constantly been compelled to test how close to a nasty death they can go, as if to defy fear and fate and death itself. It appears that in modern societies the daring souls are far from looking for death but actually enjoying the fun of escaping from injury or death. Probably, they want to make a difference in life rather than make a date with death.
Just how many have been injured or dead is a tricky subject mainly due to limited data. The point is not the death toll but what the worst-case scenario is if something goes wrong. In fact, all sports can be dangerous to varying degrees. At stake is a person's capability and flexibility and courage and luck. Contrary to common belief, golfing and fishing can be just as dangerous sometimes. Accidental deaths in playing golf because of heart attack and in being drowned while angling have occasionally been reported in local newspapers. Even as harmless as cheerleading could be risky as well.
Pro-life groups are worried. They call for public policies to ban dangerous sports or other dangerous activities. They have created a long blacklist--base jumping, cave diving, rock climbing, car racing, off-road motorcycling, boxing, white-water rafting, scuba diving, big-wave surfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, horse riding, bull riding, running with the bulls, to name only a few. The question is what to do next. To ban dangerous sports one by one or all of them once for all? Like banning smoking, banning dangerous sports is easier said than done. Chances are that banned things often go underground like cocaine.
Restricting dangerous sports actually make little sense of life as some thrill-seeking sportsmen and women. The fun of life as they see it is not necessarily related with the eventuality of harm or death. Death is destiny. Life doesn't have to be boring all the time. People die everyday, although doing nothing dangerous.
