Read the following text and do the exercises below.

Football, soccer, basketball, baseball—these mainstream sports attract the most interest. However, there is more to sports than just hitting a ball with a stick or throwing something at someone.

Here's just a few of the most unusual popular sports...

1.      Extreme Ironing

I don't know about you, but I hate ironing. It's so boring. But there is a way to get your blood pumping while you iron. It's called extreme ironing.

All you have to do is find the craziest way to iron your clothes. If that means ironing across a canyon or while jumping off a cliff, then so be it. As it says on goextremeironing.com, "...we just don't put our lives in danger-we risk our laundry."

Think you can iron your shirt while parachuting?

2.      Shin Kicking

Any sport, mainstream or not, can be considered useless. However, there is one sport that is absolutely useless but fun: shin kicking.

The point of this sport is to kick your opponent so hard with your shin, that they will fall down or you can throw them down. Talk about ruthlessness. I don't recommend wearing steel-tipped boots, unless you really want to hurt someone

3.      Cell Phone Toss

Have you ever just wanted to chuck your phone out of anger? Chucking phones has a way of making you happy.

Often people meet up and have chucking competitions. At the Seventh International Mobile Throwing World Championship, the winner chucked a phone 89 meters (or 97 yards).

4. Man Versus Horse Marathon                     

In Wales there's a famous race called the Man Versus Horse Marathon. A cross country course is laid, and human competitors pit their stamina against that of a posse of chosen horses. The course is 22 miles long with many natural obstacles to overcome. The steep slopes are a great test of the endurance of both man and horse, and the tricky forest, which a man may dart through but which a horse can only travel around, is equally difficult terrain.

The ultimate aim is to run the course and beat the first horse. This was recently done for the first time by a marine who had been training especially for the event. He won a large cash prize - a prize that's been getting bigger every year.

5. Canoe Jousting

While this is not a well-known sport, it is a fun thing to do. Two canoes race up river to a designated point. Once that point is reached by both canoes, the jousting then begins. The object is to submerge the opponent's canoe by whatever means possible, without the use of tools (ie paddles). While poles were used in the initial inception of the sport, they were proven too dangerous to use among friends. There is usually a judge on the river bank to decide when a canoe is submersed. While the judge is not always necessary, there have been some difficult calls. Scheduling of this event is usually difficult unless the participants have been drinking for the better part of the morning or the afternoon. There are no formal leagues as yet, but the popularity of the sport is growing.

       6. Wife Carrying

As well as throwing gum boots like the Australians the Finns have the great honour of holding the annual Wife Carrying World Championships. What you do is simply grab a hold of your significant other, and carry her (or him) to the finish line faster than the other competitors.

The rules say nothing at all about the weight of the wife, only that she can be yours as well as somebody else's. Also, the winning record time for 1999 was apparently included in the Guinness Book of Records.

Also Finns have Sauna World Championships. 'Competitors' have to try and stay in a steaming hot room longer than anyone else without passing out.