Passage One American Sports represent a fabric ofAmerican culture. Sports act as a unifying factor between people of all ages.Of all the sports that America has to offer, baseball is considered the pastimeof this country. Americans did not always regard baseball and other sports insuch a benign manner. Rather, sports during the early colonial times were seenas pagan and devilish things to do. Many elite and wealthy gentry who embodiedthe Victorian ideals regarded any type of games or sports as ill vices. It wasthe common people who directly related sports to their religion. On days ofreligious celebration, early Americans joined together to play games. Thesefolk games were unstructured and unruly； however, the unity that these games brought, created a need forprofessional sporting games. Folk games provided the foundation of sports. Theycreated a sense of companionship and unison among individuals. Theseunorganized folk games created the threshold for organized sports and led tothe transformation of the players’roles and the role of the audience，Amateurs became professional athletes, and the game an organizedbusiness. The game of baseball evolved from the English game of cricket androunders. It was not until the time of the Civil War that baseball began to beplayed frequently. However with the transformation of thenation, society and technology, folk games too began to evolve into spectatorsports. After the Civil War, baseball became a popular sport and no longer anarchaic folk game. Structure and organization were introduced gradually intothe game and increased public participation. The sport at first excluded thepublic, but as economic interests infiltrated the game, the need for audiencesand spectators arose. The audience of baseball was instrumental in thetransformation of baseball. The battling leagues and team rivalries created asector for the American public to participate in baseball. The process of thetransformation of American folk games into spectator games was due tocapitalism, evolution of American society, urban settings, level of playerperformance, technological advances and the addition of structure andorganization to the games；thus,transforming the sport of baseball into a monopolized andprofessional business. Organized Baseball and the Commissionhave propagated the myth that General Abner Double-day invented the game ofbaseball. This was an attempt to make baseball an American game. The Commissionwanted to distinguish baseball as a truly American game that originated inCooperstown，New York. This was a publicity stunt in order tocreate a sense of nationalism around the game in order to make the fans believethat this was their game and it belonged to no other country. It was an attemptto popularize baseball to the highest degree. The legend states that AbnerDoubleday at Cooperstown invented baseball in 1839. This myth was generated in1907 by the Commission of Baseball when Albert Spalding hired his friend,Abraham Mills, to form a commission to investigate the origins of the game.These men gathered information from some of the oldest players known to haveplayed the game. Spalding recognized the appeal of patriotism and the dynamicsof myth making. Historical myths and legends play a large role in formingnational identity and patriotic pride. This myth enabled baseball to break alltraces and origins of the game from England. This was in fact a farce. Scholarsand historians both disprove this myth and trace baseball’s origins to oldEnglish games of rounders and criquet. In 1939，Baseball celebrated its one hundredthbirthday and created the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. In the sameyear, the United States government created a commemorative stamp, which made1839 the official birth day of baseball. This enabled Baseball to establishitself as a strange American religion in which people could return to thebirthplace of the game to celebrate and remember it. Although this myth waspure fancy, the intent of the myth did enable baseball to distinguish itself aspurely American and contributed to the sport becoming America’s NationalPastime.
Today baseball in the United States is regarded as___.()
A、a pastime of the nation
B、a benign sport
C、a folk game
D、a pagan game
【正确答案】：A
【题目解析】：根据文章第一段第三句，“…，baseball is considered the pastime of this country. “答案为A。
