Which words are homophones?

 SPORTS IN NORTH AMERICA AND ITS INFLUENCE IN THE WORLD´S CULTURE

-USA: In this huge nation the most popular sports are American football (NFL), baseball, basketball, ice hockey, soccer, tennis, gold, free wrestling, badminton, boxing and martial arts.

American football is played in two teams of eleven players each with goalposts at the end where the offense players try to reach the oval-shaped ball by running with it or passing it with the feet, head, hands or sides while the defense players of the opposite team try to stop it. It started in the Universities (Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, McGill, Princeton and Harvard are in the National Collegiate Athletic Association).but the American and National Football Leagues with the Championship Game or Super Bowl which originated in the colleges ‘postseason bowl games in which the prize was a conference.

Baseball originated in bat and ball games brought by English immigrants in the eighteenth century and it is a played in two teams (offensive or batting team and fielding or defensive team) and the pitcher throws a ball which a player in the batting team tries to hit with a bat, the batting teams tries to prevent runners of the batting team to hit the ball and advance around the bases. In the United States and Canada professional Major League Baseball teams are divided into the National League and American League each with three divisions. This game is the source of many works of art and popular idioms, customs and it is part of the culture of the US in which all its citizens celebrate annual events such as the Super Bowl as a national festivity event.

Basketball is a team sport of minimum five players each in which each team tries to score shooting the ball in the opposite basket which scores two points usually. Players can only bounce the ball while running or by passing it to a teammate. They can use many shots in offense (lay-up, jump shot, dunk) or defense moves such as stealing the ball, rebound, intercept or block shots. It was invented in 1891 by Canadian American teacher James Naismith in Springfield (Massachusetts, US) and the National Basketball Association is the best professional basketball league in terms of talent, salaries, level of competition and fame. It is widely played in all the world privately or openly and there are many matches in every school, academy, house, prison, ethnic or religious group, disabled people or show basketball teams such as the Harlem Globetrotters, celebrities, school or high school basketball, slam ball, mini basketball for children, maxi basketball for elderly people and rezball by Native Americans.

-CANADA: The most popular sports are ice hockey, soccer, basketball, lacrosse, gridiron football (or American football), curling and baseball. Ice hockey is the official national winter sport in the country because it represents the Canadian culture and identity and it is played initially in the city of Montreal since the nineteenth century. It is a blend of indigenous games and stick and ball British games and though it was considered quite rough in the last century which encompasses the ideals of respectable and middle-class masculinity but now it is played by all sorts of people from different ages. There are many ice hockey trophies in Toronto such as the Hockey Hall of Fame or the Memorial Cup. There are also women competitions such as the annual Clarkson Cup and many more leagues dealing with college, university and youth teams.

Lacrosse was the only official national sport from 1859 and 1994 from that time onwards it was declared the summer national sport though until 1930 it was only played field lacrosse that changed to the new box lacrosse. In the seventeenth century it was called baggataway and tewaarathon bv massive teams and the British colonists adopted it and they played together in 1843 and ten years later approximately the first club was created in Montreal, then in a few decades in 1880s it was played nationwide and it was such a famous spectator sport that it was referred in moral terms in Social Gospel about an ideal of muscular Christianity as more working class players and spectators became the majority it was more competitive to win the prize. For example the Montreal Shamrocks had violent confrontations with the middle-class Protestant and Toronto Lacrosse Clubs. Later field lacrosse was promoted by Anglophone migrants and in Toronto started using hockey as a form of exercise during winter months when by the end of the nineteenth century it was the most famous summer game and two professional leagues were established during its golden age and increasing violence made spectators´decrease in Montreal, Victoria, Vancouver, etc. In 1931 big city hockey promoters introduced “box lacrosse” played in smaller indoor arena spaces to play matches throughout the year and keep loyal spectators. In the year 1987 the National Lacrosse League began with clubs in the US and Canada as a professional box lacrosse league whilst in 2003 Canada participated in the inaugural World Indoor Lacrosse Championship.  Later it participated in the World Lacrosse Championship was held in London, Ontario in 2006.

Gridiron football or football de grille is an indoor football played by eleven ( USA) or twelve (Canada) player teams or smaller teams such as touch and flag football played at professional, collegiate, semi-professional and amateur levels. This sport started two centuries ago of older games such as rugby union football and they are distinguished from other football sports by the use of plastic helmets, shoulder pads, forward pass, the system of down and peculiar brown leather ball in a prolate spheroid with pointed ends. By the 1860s teams from universities were playing each other in increasingly more standardized rules based on the soccer rules of the English Football Association, Harvard University (“carrying game”) whilst McGill University of Montreal used rules based on rugby union and in the middle of the twentieth century the Burnside rules established the modern game.

Curling nicknamed chess on ice or the Roaring Game is a sport in which four players in two teams which each has eight slide stones on a sheet of ice towards a target area which is divided in four concentric circles related to bowls or shuffleboard in polished granite stones called rocks across the ice curling sheet toward the house, a circular target marked on the ice.  Originally came from Scotland in the early 16^th century and the world´s oldest curling stone is kept in The Stirling Smith Art Gallery, there are records in Paisley Abbey in 1541 and two paintings “Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap” and “The Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Brügel the Older in which Flemish peasants play it without brooms. In Scotland was constituted the first club in 1716 named Kilsyth Curling Club and built the oldest curling pond of a low dam from a shallow pool and the Grand Caledonian Curling Club in 1838 was famous among the first Scottish sport club though soon became famous in all the British Empire due to a curling exhibition by the count of Mansfield in Perth during a visit of Queen Victoria. She became so enthusiastic that sponsored the club and named it Royal Caledonian Curling Club and became famous in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand but mainly Canada due to the cold climate, the Scottish settlers and multiple sponsors. Scotland and Canada created the Scotch Cup curling competition but from the year 1968 the Air Canada Silver Broom and many male, female, junior or adult teams have participated in many international competitions and the Winter Olimpic Games.