Reаd the pаssаge then answer the questiоn that fоllоws. The influence of sports reaches far and wide. Sports are particularly popular in our leisure-oriented American society, where they perform several major beneficial functions. To being with, sports are conducive to success in other areas of life. Being competitive, sports inspire athletes to do their utmost to win, helping them to develop such qualities as skill and ability, diligence and self-discipline, mental alertness, and physical fitness. These qualities can ensure success in the larger society. By watching athletes perform, spectators also learn the importance of hard work, playing by the rules, and working as a team player-characteristics that help ensure success in a career and other aspects of life. Next, sports enhance health and happiness. Participants can enjoy a healthy, long life. The health benefit is more than physical, however; it is also psychological. Runners and joggers, for example, often find that their activity releases tension and anger as well as relieves anxiety and depression. Moreover, many people derive much pleasure from looking on their participation as a form of beauty, an artistic expression, or a way of having a good time with friends. Similarly, sports improve the quality of life for spectators. Fans can escape their humdrum daily routines or find pleasure in filling their leisure time, as many Americans do when watching baseball, long known as the national pastime. They can savor the aesthetic pleasure of watching the excellence, beauty, and creativity in an athlete's performance. The fans can therefore attain greater happiness, life satisfaction, or psychological well-being. Third, sports contribute to social order and stability by serving as an integrating force for society as a whole. Sports are, in effect, a social mechanism for uniting potentially disunited members of society. Through their common interest in a famous athlete or team, people of diverse racial, social, and cultural backgrounds can feel a sense of community or intimacy that they can acquire in no other way. Athletes, too, can identify with their fans, their community, and their country. But sports can also be seen as harming society by serving the interests of the relatively powerful over those of the powerless in at least two ways. For one thing, sports tend to act as an opiate, numbing the masses' sense of dissatisfaction with capitalist society. Involvement in sports as spectators distracts low-paid or unemployed workers from their tedious and dehumanizing jobs or frustrating joblessness. In addition, sports reinforce social inequalities in society. Regrettably, the overemphasis on competition and winning has caused the loss of something all participants can enjoy equally-namely, the original elements of play and fun in sporting activities. Many people have become "couch potatoes" who spend more time watching than playing sports. And sports have turned into big business, with powerful owners of professional teams exploiting the public and government. Aside from making enormous sums of money from the fans, team owners receive many tax breaks while enjoying the enviable position of being the only self-regulated (in effect, unregulated) monopoly in the nation. Sports is now an elitist system in which a very tiny group of owners and players become tycoons and superstars, while a huge number of potential players are transformed into mere spectators. In this passage, the author is biased in favor of...