Benefits of Team Sports

Team sports are sports that require many players such as football, basketball and volleyball among others and they offer many great benefits. 【小题1】 Instead, they desire to have their children succeed in individual sports. The following are major benefits of taking part in team sports.

Team sports improve leadership abilities. Team sports are very vital in helping children develop their leadership abilities. 【小题2】 It is very important for every player in any team sport to be aware of their roles in the class of leadership. Players also learn the importance of supporting the leader and therefore promoting the efficiency of the team.

Team sports promote responsibility. Similar to other sports, team sports teach the players how to become more responsible in their lives. 【小题3】 Parents also do not allow their children to take team sports unless they complete their school work.

【小题4】 Team sports such as soccer and basketball are a great method of exercising as they involve constant running as well as other activities that work the body muscles. It can therefore help students to manage their weight and get fitter. Furthermore, team sports are particularly effective for exercising leg muscles.

Team sports have social benefits. There is always a great sense of loyalty (忠诚) to the team and this strengthens social relationships. This also hugely inspires a child’s social life since he or she is going to make many new friends. Team sports also increase self-respect and therefore increase happiness. 【小题5】

The shortcoming of team sports is that you are required to share everything when you are member of a team and that you might be easily overshadowed (使失色) if the other players are better than you.

Technology usually distracts us from nature. But now technology is “offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” wrote professor Karen Bakker in her new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.

All around the animal kingdom, there are sounds that we struggle to pick up and decipher. Elephants, for example, communicate with each other using infrasound (次声波), a sound frequency far below our human hearing range. Coral in the ocean also communicates with each other through sound waves, with one purpose being to attract baby coral to areas where it can successfully grow. This is a shocking fact as coral doesn’t have any ears! Scientists have placed listening devices in these environments to pick up sounds humans are normally unable to detect.

After the sounds are recorded, AI is then able to determine their meaning, according to the news website Vox. There are now whole databases of whale songs and honeybee dances. Bakker wrote that one day this information could be turned into “a zoological version of Google Translate”. One animal language Bakker wrote about is that of the elephant. She explained how elephants “have a different signal for honeybee, which is a threat, and a different signal for human,” in an interview with Vox. “Moreover, they distinguish between threatening humans and non-threatening humans,” she said.

This technology can not only understand the animals, but also communicate back to them. For example, bees use dances to communicate to their peers where to go in search of nectar (花蜜). A research team in Germany, therefore, plugged the bee language AI database system in to a robot bee, allowing the robot to create a dance routine that can tell the bees which direction to move. Vox reported. Whereas in the past language creation had been limited to mainly apes, with there being many examples of chimpanzees having been aught sign language to communicate with humans, this new technology now allows humans to socialize with different animals throughout the animal kingdom.

Recently, a team of young researchers in Panama has found a special ant species that rapidly repairs any damage to its host tree.

The events leading to the discovery began in mid-2020, when Alex and his friends would kill time by shooting clay balls at trees with a slingshot. They targeted the thin Cecropia trees to make the task more challenging. Things went well until one clay ball accidentally hit a tree trunk, leaving a clean exit and entry wound.

Concerned that he had caused permanent damage, Alex went back to examine the tree the following morning, accompanied by his father William, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). To their surprise, the hole had been completely mended! Curious to find out what was going on, Alex and his friends enlisted in the STRI’s volunteer program.

The teens, as instructed, drilled holes in the Cecropia trees and then carefully documented what followed. The young scientists found that in 14 of the 22 cases, groups of Azteca alfari ants immediately gathered in the damaged area and instantly got to work without a break. The industrious insects, using material from the trees, significantly reduced the size of the hole soon. In most cases, the gap was completely filled up within 24 hours.

The sand-colored insects’ harmonious relationship with the Cecropia trees has been known for many years. The trees provide the ants with food and shelter. In return, the insects protect their leaves from plant-eating animals. However, their repair skills — which researchers suspect have been developed fixing damage caused by the sharp nails of the sloths that frequent the trees — had never been seen before.

“This project allowed us to experience first-hand all the complicated details behind a scientific study. It was really a great learning experience,” said Alex.

Alex and his team, who recently published their findings, still have one riddle to solve. They aren’t sure why the insects didn’t repair all the holes. Understanding this selective behavior is something they hope to explore in the future — stay tuned!