问答题 {{B}} Passage 1{{/B}} Ellen Wille, the Norwegian association's delegate at the 45th FIFA (Fédéation Internationale de Football Association) Congress in Mexico City in 1986, impressed upon FIFA that more should be done to further women' football and to unfold the latent potential in this sector of the game. Little did Wille know her spark would light the way for the women's football movement.// Presiding over the debates at the Congress, former FIFA President Joāo Havelange not only agreed entirely with the Norwegian female representative but also assured her that he personally would back the women's football movement, setting up an ad hoc committee as the first step. // Have lange and then-Secretary General Joseph Blatter were serious about supporting the women's sector. As a long-serving member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Havelange had seen for himself how women had been given the opportunity to compete as equals in a variety of Olympic disciplines to the sheer delight of the crowds. It was only a question of time before women would be beating the drum for their own world football tournament. If football genuinely intended to achieve universal appeal, it could not turn its back on the female half of the world's population. // Following the FIFA President's consent, the women's football scene in pioneering countries such as Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy and the USA—where 40 percent of all the players enrolled in clubs are girls and women—was given a shot in the arm. The prospects of a world championship afforded women's football an arena that would highlight the attractiveness and style of this type of football. In any case, it was high time to snuff out any remaining prejudice. which, although unfounded, would still be difficult to eradicate. // Sure enough, in 1988 a tournament was staged in the province of Guangdong in southern China as a testing ground for a world championship. The high standards of play coupled with the scramble for tickets convinced the world governing body and its special committee that they were steering in the right direction. //The auspicious start motivated the World Cup's official sponsors to cultivate an interest in women's football. Barely three years later, twelve national teams from all over the world gathered in southern China where the women footballers enraptured the football world in Guangzhou and four other towns in Guangdong province. // Spurred on by spirited crowds, they demolished the wall of prejudice that had once thwarted their progress with displays of technique, imagination and dynamism at their first world championship in PRC. //The positive impression was perpetuated when the FIFA Referees' Committee appointed women to officiate as referees and to serve on the touchline for one of the matches. The high point came when, for the first time in the history of a FIFA competition, Claudia de Vasconcelos from Brazil competently refereed the playoff for third place as though it was second nature. // China 1991 was a solid foundation on which to build. Responding to a suggestion from women players and officials that there was still a great deal of groundwork to be done, FIFA invited interested parties to a seminar in Zurich in autumn 1992. // The outcome was a somewhat sobering experience in spite of encouraging signs of growth in the USA and some leading European footballing countries. Elsewhere, however, social conventions stood in the way of a breakthrough for women's football. Even today in countries in which women's football is widely played there still exists a disconcerting lack of resources to establish a professional league at the top of the scale. // The infrastructure for men's football took decades to develop before it acquired the predominance it enjoys today. Women's football ventured its first hesitant steps at the end of the last century but, in spite of widespread popularity over the past twenty years, it is still very much in its infancy. This is where the associations come in. It is now up to them to nurture women's football actively (it is, after all, the most popular women's team sport in the world) by incorporating it, for example, in their general television and marketing contracts. //