język angielski - zadania wielokrotnego wyboru na poziomie rozszerzonym - rozumienie tekstów pisanych

Over the summer there was an extraordinary bit of transfer business, when the club bought Clive Allen for a million pounds. They didn’t like the look of him in a couple of preseason friendly games and swapped him for a lousy defender Kenny Sansom. And even though Southampton were not the most attractive of opponents, there was a forty-thousand-plus crowd that night. It was the first match of the season and fans are always that bit keener to go along.

Anyway, something went wrong – they hadn’t opened enough gates, or the police had made a mess of controlling the crowd flow, whatever – and there was a huge crush outside the North Bank entrances. I could pick both my legs up and remain hanging. At one stage, I had to use my elbows to give myself just that little bit more room and to stop my own fists digging into my chest and stomach. It wasn’t anything special. Fans have all been in situations where for a few moments things have looked bad. But I remember struggling for breath when I approached the front of the queue, I was so constricted that I couldn’t fill my lungs properly. The situation was definitely threatening my life. When I finally got through the gate I sat down on a step for a while, gave myself time to recover, and I noticed that a lot of other people were doing the same.

But the thing was, I trusted the system. I knew that I could not be squashed to death, because that never happened at football matches. You see, in England somebody, somewhere, knew what they were doing, and there was this system, which nobody ever explained to us, that prevented accidents of this kind. It might seem as though the authorities, the club and the police were pushing their luck on occasions, but that was because we didn’t understand properly how they were organising things. How could you die when help was a few metres away?

But I thought about that evening nine years later, on the afternoon of the Hillsborough disaster. It occurred to me that I could have died that night. There was no plan after all. They really had been riding their luck all that time.

Every year, sports-related head injuries and concussions affect several hundred thousand athletes – both professional and amateur. What’s worrying is that despite advances in protective gear technology, the numbers are only increasing. According to the Centre for Disease Control, emergency room visits relating to sports-related injuries involving concussions among children and adolescents have increased by 60% in the last decade. Surprisingly though, surveys indicate that a significant number of student athletes – 16% or more – return to a game right after sustaining a head injury.

To try and combat this worrying trend, a smart mouthguard has been devised. Called Vector, it looks and feels just like a normal mouthguard, except for one thing – it is fitted with advanced technology which can wirelessly transmit information from the mouthpiece to a computer program that can run on a tablet or smartphone.

The Vector mouthguard is attached to the upper jaw. It accurately measures skull movement and the acceleration of the brain during the impact and transmits an alert each time a player is hit, informing the coach of his/her name, the G-force and the location of the injury.

In addition, the coaches also receive a 3D version of the player’s head with the impact details. This allows them to closely screen the athletes that are sustaining the most hits during a game or a camp practice. Additionally, the data gathered are also useful in the continuing studies on enhancing the safety of the sport.

The Vector mouthguard is currently being tested by twenty players in Louisiana State University’s football team. While the program is still in its initial stages, Jack Marucci, the athletics coach, is happy with the accuracy of the data he receives from this smart device. He plans to use his team’s findings in the hopes of reducing injuries at the fall camp practice sessions, which are known for hard-hitting tactics. The senior associate athletic trainer, Shelley Mullenix, describes the alerts from the mouthguard, as a “second set of eyes.”

If all goes well in this final phase of testing, by fall Vector mouthguards will be available to everybody in high street stores. Priced at 199 USD, the device is not cheap, but it is a small price to pay to protect players from life-threatening injuries. The best news is that it will be produced in various sizes, so that even athletes as young as 12 can be protected.