Ball games are a big source of modern amusement. But they're nothing new. For instance, consider a 4,500-year-old ball     1    (find) in a child's tomb in Egypt or 3.600-year-old rubber balls from Central America-where the competitors were asked to play the balls with their hips(臀部）.

So far, researchers     2    (make) sure of a date of the oldest sporting balls in Europe or Asia: three balls, dug up from the tombs of horsemen in the deserts of northwestern China and crafted three thousand     3    (year) ago.

＂We are quite sure they were used in some sort of bat-and-ball game."Patrick Wertmann is an expert at the University of Zurich     4     analyzed the ancient sporting equipment. The balls are about three inches in diameter and filled     5    leather hair. “And then, also,     6    (look) at the Chinese character of "ball" itself, you'll find it quite     7    (interest) because this character is made up of the ideograms(表意文字）of hair and leather.”

As for how this ancient ball-and-stick game     8     （play)? “lt could be something like polo. But it could also be something like     9     early form of golf.

Since we don't have any textural evidence and we don't have any sticks from the same period, we don't really know     10    （exact).”