英语畅谈中国文化 50 主题 第 49 章 Globalization of Spots 体育运动的全球化A: Have you heard of hula hoops?B: Of course. It was very popular in China during the 1990s. Nearly everyone played with the plastic ring. Doctors recommended it as a good tool for keeping fit. Various contests were held on TV. Someone even tried to apply for a Guinness world record. The demand for hula hoops was so high that they were out of stock for quite some time. A: Did you know that hula hoops were also very popular in the United States?B: No, I didn't. A: It was in March 1958. One company began making plastic hula hoops that sold for 93 cents each. That's when the big ring got its name, Hula Hoop. By September that year, over 2 million hula hoops were sold, reaping a profit of over $ 300, 000. By the year end, if all copycats were also counted, tens of millions of hula hoops were sold. In Japan, hospitals were crowded with people who had hurt themselves while playing with hula hoops. Even Japan's Prime Minister received a hula hoop as his 62 nd birthday present. When a group of Belgian scientists went on an exploration trip to the Antarctic, they took 20 hula hoops with them. In Johannesburg, local charity organizations made a donation of hula hoops to the poor. In Warsaw, a newspaper article called on the government to immediately start producing hula hoops or Poland would lag far behind the other countries.B: It sounds like a globalization of hula hoops. What happened afterwards? A: By summer 1959 many cities had deserted hula hoops all over the place.B: More than 30 years later, thanks to its open door policy, the waves of hula hoops finally reached China. A: Sports globalization started way ahead of economic globalization. If the origin of soccer were traced to a similar sport during the Song Dynasty, as some Chinese have suggested, then it's much earlier than hula hoops. It also has a much longer lasting effect.B: Over a century ago, shepherds in Scotland started a game called golf. Now golfing has become a sport exclusively for the wealthy in China. That's an even more convincing example to illustrate the magnitude of globalization.
