Which best title serves for the passage?

Read the following passage and mark the letter Ay By Cy or D on your answer sheet to  indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 36 to 42

Whether they’re cheering in the stadium, yelling at the referee from the sofa, or singing thier team’s victory song, sports fans exist all over the world. The long-term attchment to a particular sport or team appears to develop around the age of eight or nine, and the sport or team a person decides to follow is largely influenced by their social circle rather than their personal participation in a sport. Research into the psychology of sports fans has revealed some common principles that apply to the behaviour of most fans. 

Have you ever heard a sports fan boasting, ‘We thrashed the other team today!’ or ‘We are top of the league at the moment’? Clearly the fan was not personally involved in achieving either success, yet they use the pronoun ‘we’ to report their team’s performance. Fans’ use of ‘us’ and ‘we’ to talk about their favourite team is common behaviour. It demonstrates the strong sense of identity fans feel great and enjoy experiencing the victory as if they had played a part in the success themselves. 

The opposite of this often happens after a team suffers a defeat. Fans in this case may refer to the team as ‘they’ in order to distance themselves from their team’s disappointing match result. A dissatisfied fan is more likely to say ‘they played really badly’ as they want no responsibility for the depressing final score. Furthermore, they will be unlikely to wear any clothing that pinpoints them as a supporter after losing to a rival team. However, research shows that this is not the case with fiercely loyal or ‘true’ fans. They will carry on wearing their team scarf even when their team performs badly and will say with genuine sadness, ‘they  beat US three nil’. 

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, is the way in which sports fans swear by their superstitions or lucky charms. Wearing a certain item of clothing or carrying a lucky object is common practice of many. People who may not be superstitious in other aspect of their life  will claim that wearing a certain item of lucky clothing will make their team play better. Equally, an action performed while the team lost will be considered bad luck and will be avoided in future for fear of jinxing the team. Of course in reality it makes no difference what kind of hat you wear or whether you have your lucky coin, but superstitions are taken very seriously by sports fans and I for one would not like to try and persuade them otherwise. 

Adapted from Gold experience by Kathryn Alevizos, Suzane Gaynar & Megan Rodeck

Which best serves as the title for the passage?

• A. Sports fans
• B. Superstitions
• C. Success and failure in sports
• D. True sports fans