Listening 24 – Listen for specific words

I want to tell you about my favorite sport, American football. Now this game has a lot of rules, and I have been watching it for over years – and I still don’t understand every single rule of the game. But I will try to do my best to explain it to you in this amount of time.

I think it’s easiest if I it to soccer. In soccer you have a field, and at the end of the field there are two goals, and each team is trying to their own goal while trying to put the soccer ball into the other team’s goal to score a point. Football’s the same way. The field is 100 yards , and at either end there is an area known as the end zone. Now there is no goal and nets, but if a player manages to cross into the end zone while holding the football, they score a touchdown. In football, a touchdown is six points.

The goal of the defense is to prevent the offense from down the field – and they can do this by tackling, and they can do this by intercepting the football – thus making them into the offense. The goal of the offense, aside from trying to score a touchdown, is to move the ball at least 10 yards from the last spot of the ball.

For example, the referee will the football at the 20-yard line. The offense must get the ball to at least the 30-yard line. The offense only has four chances to move the ball those ten yards. These chances are known as “downs” in football. If the offense to move the football at least 10 yards in those four tries, then they have to turn the ball over to the other team, who then goes on offense.

One of my favorite teams in football is the Cincinnati Bengals. And the only why this is, is because I was born in Cincinnati Ohio, so I have to root for the home team, right? But as I learned more about football, I started to follow other teams. And one of my other favorite teams is the New York Giants. There were a lot of on there that I really liked, and so that’s what drew me to them. Most of them have , but the quarterback Eli Manning still plays for the Giants.

One of the most memorable plays that I can recall happened when the Giants the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 42. The Super Bowl is the championship game for the entire football season. The game was a nail-biter; it was going back and forth, back and forth. the Giants were in the lead, then the Patriots.

In the last two minutes of the game, the Patriots were ahead 14-10, and the Giants had to if they wanted a chance to win. Remember the set of downs that I told you about? Well, the Giants failed to move those ten yards on their first three downs, so this was one of those where they were going to go for it on fourth down because if they did not, they were going to lose the game.

When the quarterback gets the ball at the beginning of a play, they want to throw the ball within three to five seconds. Eli Manning had the ball for over fourteen seconds, and was nearly tackled three times. The third time, he to throw the ball – and it sailed really high into the air. And one of his receivers had to leap really high into the air.

And he caught the ball with one hand and it down to his helmet. He couldn’t use his other hand because one of the Patriots defenders had it, and him over while he was still in mid-air. So the Giants player sandwiched the football between his hand and his helmet, and hit the ground right on his back. And miraculously, he did not the ball. And this set the Giants up to win the game and the Super Bowl, and become champions for that year.

It was amazing – I think most people were rooting for the Giants because the Patriots had already won three Super Bowls in that , and a lot of people didn’t want to see them win the fourth. And sadly for the Patriots, in addition to losing the Super Bowl, they lost their season because they had not lost a game up until the Super Bowl.