Golden Age of Hollywood

• During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the early 1960s, thousands of movies were issued from the Hollywood studios. The start of the Golden Age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, ending the silent era and increasing box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula - Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture) - and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For example, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothartalways worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman worked at20th Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's films were almost all made at Paramount, and directorHenry King's films were mostly made for 20th Century Fox.

40. Sports and Physical Culture in us

• Whether they are fans or players, the millions of Americans who participate in sports are usually passionate about their games.

• There is more to being a baseball fan than buying season tickets to the home team's games. A real fan not only can recite each player's batting average, but also competes with other fans to prove who knows the answers to the most obscure and trivial questions about the sport. That's dedication.

• Dedication short of madness is also what inspired hundreds of thousands of football fans to fill Denver's stadium in dangerously freezing temperatures, not to watch an exciting game but just to demonstrate team support in a pre-Superbowl pep rally, days before the actual contest.

• And it is with passion that Americans pursue the latest fitness fad, convinced that staying fit requires much more than regular exercise and balanced meals.

• For anyone who claims a real desire to stay healthy, fitness has become a science of quantification involving weighing, measuring, moni­toring, graph charting, and computer printouts.

• These are the tools for knowing all about pulse and heart rates, calorie intake, fat cell per muscle cell ratios, and almost anything else that shows the results of a workout.

• Jogging is extremely popular, perhaps because it is the cheapest and most accessible sport. Aerobic exercise and training with weight-lifting machines are two activities which more and more men and women are pursuing.

• Practices and games are generally held on the school premises after classes are over. High schools and colleges recognize outstanding athletic achievement with trophies, awards, and scholarships, and student athletes receive strong community support.

• For many people, sports are big business. The major television networks contract with professional sports leagues for the rights to broadcast their games.

41. Patterns of the American Family

• Delayed marriage and frequent divorce are transforming the American household, etching patterns of solitude, single parenthood and homes increasingly filled by unmarried couples, a new Census Bureau survey shows.

• Children of the 1950's are living alone in record numbers, children of the 1960's and 1970's linger in the parental nest and almost one-quarter of the children of the 1980's and 90's are living with a single parent.

• The March 1990 survey -- which is not based on the 1990 census, whose data have not yet been refined -- confirmed patterns that are already staple themes in television scripts and sociological research. But the survey also offered a long view of the changes in American marriage and family patterns. Marrying Later Than Ever

• While men and women are marrying later than ever before in this century (at an average age of 26.1 for men's first marriages and nearly 23.9 years for women's first marriages), the 1990 figures complete a parabolic trend that bottomed out in 1956 (when men, on average, married at the age of 22.5 and women at the age of 20.2), and is now back where it was a hundred years ago.

• One population researcher believes that the trend toward delayed marriage may be peaking.

• "Women in their 20's have had enough opportunity to observe both the pros and cons of delayed marriage and delayed childbearing," said Thomas Espenshade, a professor at Princeton University's Office of Population Research. "They want to have a better balance in their lives between careers and family. I think there will be a new trend toward somewhat earlier ages of marriage and childbearing."

• Douglas Gurak, a sociologist at Cornell University, said he expected no downturn in the numbers of children living in single-parent households -- now 15.8 million, or 25.9 percent of the children under the age of 18. "I don't see the dynamics for a shift there, or even a plateauing of the trend," Dr. Gurak said.

• Of the children in single-parent households, 38.6 percent are living with a divorced parent, and 30.6 percent are living with a parent who has never married.

• Another trend that shows no signs of abating is the tendency of grown children to live with their parents. More than half of those from 18 to 24 years of age are living with their parents, compared with 42 percent in 1960. One in nine adults from 25 to 34 also lives in a parent's home, an increase of more than 25 percent in the stay-at-home rate since 1960.