Research shows that in the United States a great number of teenagers who once enjoyed sports no longer participate in middle or high school sports team. These teenagers say it’s just not worth it. Why do promising athletes walk away from middle school or high school sports, and what should you do if your athlete decides not to play team sports?

Take Madeline for example. When she was living with her family in Texas a couple of years ago, Madeline joined her middle school’s track team. She was new to the sport, but she was fast. She worked hard, and she won medals. Then one day, Madeline fell and cracked a bone in her wrist. Her track season was over.

Her coaches were upset, but probably not in the way you’d expect. Rather than comforting their promising athlete suffering from a disappointing sports injury or encouraging her to return next season, they turned their back on her. “They shunned me for the rest of the year,” recalls Madeline, who has since moved to the East Coast. “I guess because I would no longer be winning them any medals.”

“Sports lost their appeal for me,” says Madeline. “I did end up trying out for the track team last year, but I actually found myself overwhelmed with memories and emotions from my experience the previous year and ended up dropping out.”

Talk to coaches, parents and teenagers about the downside of sports, and you’ll hear the same answer: by middle school and certainly by high school, it has more often than not become a game of medals. Not the plain old fun of playing. Not the extra benefits that sports offer. But winning.

Hoo, the online hotel room offer platform, has found that the level of staycations (宅度假) being taken across 16 global holiday hotspots has increased by an average of 18 percent when compared to this time last year.

With the cost of accommodation also climbing 16 percent, Hoo found more of an increase in domestic (国内) demand for travel. “This time last year, we were already starting to see caution where our holidays were concerned, as the growing threat of COVID caused uncertainty over travel plans. A year down the line and there’s an obvious shift away from international travel,” Hoo co-founder Adrian Murdock said in a statement. “Although we now remain in lockdown in many parts of the world, many are hoping that the easing of restrictions (限制) will allow domestic travel by the time the holiday season arrives.”

Hoo, a British-based company, is an online platform that allows users to book a hotel room at the advertised rate or to make an offer on the room which the hotel can accept or decline in real-time. The figures it collected from 16 key tourism markets show that, currently, an average of 76 percent of all bookings are for domestic holidays, with just 24 percent of bookings being made for holidays abroad. This is an 18 percent swing when compared to the same point last year when just 58 percent of bookings were for domestic holidays.

At the same time, this domestic demand seems to have caused an increase in the cost of staycations. Hoo also analyzed hotel room rates across major cities within each nation and found that the average cost of a room per night has increased by 16 percent.

A polyglot is someone who has a deep love for languages, and is able to speak, use, and understand several of them.     11    

Actress Natalie Portman is one famous polyglot. She can speak five languages, including Spanish, English, Hebrew, French, and Japanese. Along with her passion for acting, Natalie also loves learning world languages and has a serious thirst for knowledge.     12    

Another famous actress with a passion for knowledge is television and film star Mila Kunis. Mila was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States with her family when she was a child. So she can speak fluent Russian and English. Mila has also spoken about how difficult learning English was after the sudden move to the U.S., but you wouldn't notice by listening to her now.     13     Her Russian is still impeccable (无可挑剔) in Russian language interviews.

    14     One famous polyglot is the ancient Egyptian ruler Cleopatra. The ruler of the ancient Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt was believed to speak at least nine languages. Her native language was Greek. She was believed to have learned Egyptian, Hebrew, and Troglodyte. She was also believed to have spoken the languages of the Ethiopians, Syrians, Armenians, Medes, and Parthians as well.            15     The famous Serbian-American engineer and inventor of the alternating-current electrical system was fluent in eight different languages, including Serbo-Croatian, English, French, Czech, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.