[*] “ Five ... Four ... Three ... Two ... One ... See ya!“ and Chance McGuire, twenty five, is airborne off a 600-foot concrete dam in Northern California. In one second he falls 15 feet, in two seconds 60 feet, and after three seconds and 130 feet, he is flying at 66 miles an hour. McGuire is a practitioner of what he calls the king of all extreme sports. BASE—an acronym for building, antenna, span(bridge)and earth(cliffs)—jumping has one of the sporting world’s highest fatality rates: in its 18-year history, forty-six participants have been killed. Yet the sport has never been more popular, with more than a thousand jumpers in the United States, and more seeking to get into it every day. It is an activity without margin for error. If your chute malfunctions, don’t bother researching for a reserve—there isn’t time. There are no second chances. Still, the sport may be a perfect fit with the times. Americans may have more in common with McGuire than they know or care to admit. America has embarked on a national orgy of thrill seeking and risk taking. The rise of adventure and extreme sports such as BASE jumping, snowboarding, ice climbing, skateboarding, and paragliding is merely the most vivid manifestation of this new national behavior. The rising popularity of extreme sports speaks of an eagerness on the part of millions of Americans to participate in activities closer to the edge, where danger, skill, and fear combine to give weekend warriors and professional athletes alike a sense of pushing out personal boundaries. According to American Sports Data Inc. , a consulting firm, participation in so-called extreme sports is way up. Snowboarding has grown 113 percent in five years and now boasts nearly 5. 5 million participants. Mountain hiking, skateboarding, scuba diving—their growth curves reveal a nation that loves to play with danger. Contrast that with activities such as baseball, touch football, and aerobics, all of which were in steady decline throughout the 1990s. The pursuits that are becoming more popular have one thing in common: the perception that they are somehow more challenging than a game of touch football. “ Every human being with two legs and two arms is going to wonder how fast, how strong, how enduring he or she is,“ says Eric Perlman, a mountaineer and film maker specializing in extreme sports. “ We are designed to experience or die. “

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had passed she went away to her room alone. She refused to have anyone follow her. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that filled her body and seemed to reach into her soul. She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines indicated repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off in the distance on a patch of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know: it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the wounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell with excitement. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was struggling to beat it back with her will, as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath, “ free, free, free! “ The empty stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed sharp and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as of little importance. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death: the face that had never looked except with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

When looking for love, people may go to some extreme lengths. They might go on blind dates set up by family and friends. They might write personal ads to place in newspapers. Or they might use a computer to help them in their search for a soul mate by joining an online dating service. Some people have even tried to find their perfect match through game shows on television. Many of these TV dating shows, including The Bachelor and Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire“? have proved to be ratings blockbusters, with millions of viewers watching each week to find out which of the contestants will find true love. Of all these game shows, perhaps the one with the most unexpected ending was Mr. Right, which was shown in England in 2002. On the show, a bachelor, thirty-five-year-old Lance Gerrard-Wright, dated fifteen women to find the one who was his ideal partner. The host of the show was Ul-rika Jonsson, an English celebrity originally from Sweden. For seven weeks on the show, Gerrard-Wright took turns going on dates with each of the women, taking them to expensive restaurants and exotic locations. He even met the women’s families and introduced them to his own. Then at the end of each episode, he would choose between one and three of the contestants with whom he had felt the least compatible, and say goodbye to them. At one point during the series, one contestant volunteered to leave because she said she didn’t find him attractive. After two dates she said she had had enough, and she couldn’t see it working, “ He wasn’t my cup of tea. “ In another episode the woman he was on a date with burst into tears when he called her by another contestant’s name. “ You called me by another girl’s name. I can’t believe you did that. I really liked you,“ she sobbed. But in the final episode, the woman he eventually chose decided she didn’t want to marry him after all. “ I think you’ve chosen me because you have to choose someone,“ she said. Maybe this was because she already knew he had fallen in love with the show’s host! After leaving the show, Gerrard-Wright and Jonsson were seen dining together and attending parties around London more and more often. Finally, on May 1 , 2003, Gerrard-Wright proposed to Jonsson on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. And she accepted his proposal right away, although it was a conditional acceptance. Jonsson has two children from previous relationships—an eight-year-old son, Cameron, and a two-year-old daughter, Bo. She had to make sure that they agreed to the marriage. Luckily, they did. Gerrard-Wright said, “In the end the show did work for me. I grabbed an opportunity to get a girlfriend and I did. Ulrika’s gorgeous. “

[*] David Blaine calls himself an illusionist—a kind of magician who appears to do spectacular and often dangerous tricks. Among his more widely publicized feats, Blaine has been buried alive for a week, spent sixty hours encased in a hollow block of ice, and spent thirty-five hours standing on a platform 50 centimeters in diameter at the top of a 30-metre high pillar. In 2003 , the thirty-year-old illusionist from New York spent forty-four days in a clear plastic box that was hanging from a crane above the Thames River in Lon-don. But there was more to this trick than just staying in a small box for such a long time. Blaine also went without food for the entire period living nothing but water the whole time. On the day Blaine entered the box and the crane lifted him high above the river, a crowd of curious spectators gathered to watch. For the next six weeks the crowds continued to drop by the site to watch Blaine sleeping, writing in his journal, and staring back at them. However, not everyone just wanted to watch. Some people came to give Blaine a hard time and to do things to break the magician’s will and force him to come down. A few people threw things at his box or grilled food under it so that the smell would float up to the starving performer. One person even went so far as to try and cut the hose carrying water up to Blaine’s box, but security guards stopped the vandal before he could do any damage. Finally, after forty-four days up in the air, Blaine was lowered to the ground and released from his box. He was weak and much thinner than before, but the performer still managed to give a short speech to the crowd gathered to watch him emerge. Then he was put in an ambulance and rushed to a hospital where he spent the next week recovering from his ordeal. Not everyone in the crowd was satisfied with the ending of the magician’s stunt. They had come expecting to see a dramatic finale. Some of the suggestions for ending the feat in a spectacular way included dropping the box into the river and watching Blaine escape, or opening the box in the air and letting Blaine jump out. Or, in a true magician’s fashion, some people wanted to see him vanish into thin air, leaving a white rabbit in his place. So what did David Blaine finally accomplish through this amazing feat of endurance? He certainly generated a lot of headlines! Along with a number of articles appearing in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, various websites sprang up both supporting and criticizing the man and his stunt.

____ rate doesn’t stop people from getting into BASE jumping every day.

The rise of extreme sports manifests the national behavior of__and_.

The combination of fear, skill and danger gives both amateurs and professionals a sense of______.

Which of the following activities reveals a nation that loves to play activities closer to the edge?

What does Eric mean by saying “We are designed to experience or die“?

____ rate doesn’t stop people from getting into BASE jumping every day.

The rise of extreme sports manifests the national behavior of______and_____.

The combination of fear, skill and danger gives both amateurs and professionals a sense of______.

Which of the following activities reveals a nation that loves to play activities closer to the edge?

What does Eric mean by saying “We are designed to experience or die“?

The rise of extreme sports manifests the national behavior of__and_.