The most popular ice hockey club is named "ESC Moskitos Essen" and the biggest basketball club "ETB Wohnbau Baskets Essen".
Essen also has many table tennis and swimming clubs.
Essen's twin towns are:
Gardening
Gardening is the growing of plants such as flowers, shrubs and trees as a hobby or recreation. Some people also grow vegetables or fruit in their gardens. People do gardening outdoors in the soil in their backyard, or in pots or containers on their balcony or on their patio. Some people do gardening on a roof.
People do indoor gardening inside their house or inside a building. Sometimes indoor gardening is done in greenhouses, which are special buildings where plants are grown. A greenhouse has a transparent glass or plastic roof and walls that let sunlight in. Grow tent is also used for indoor plants. Grow tent helps plant to grow in a more spectacular and develop a friendly environment. Water gardening is growing plants in ornamental pools and ponds. People doing water gardening plant water lilies and other aquatic plants.
Gardening can be done outside of the home, in city parks, botanical gardens, zoos, amusement parks, theme parks, and around tourist attractions. These types of gardens are cared for by people called gardeners or groundskeepers.
Gardening is related to farming. But farming is done on a much larger scale. A farm may have hundreds of square kilometres of plants and crops. A garden in a person's backyard usually only measures a few square meters. As well, farming is done as a business, to sell the crops, fruit, and vegetables that are produced. Gardening is done just to produce fruit or vegetables for the gardener's own family. Gardening is done as a hobby or as a recreation, not as a business.
Gardeners use tools to dig in the soil and water the crops. These tools include a spade, a fork, a hoe, a basket, a watering can, a hose, a Sprinkler, a bucket, a trowel and a wheelbarrow. With growing, technology gardeners now have tech like Self-watering containers, Garden sensors, Hydroponic systems and Indoor lighting systems.
In many countries and cultures, designing beautiful gardens is treated as a fine art. In Japan, for instance, Zen monks created Japanese gardens. In Europe in the 1700s, kings and queens had formal gardens built. One example is the gardens at the Versailles palace in Paris, France. Landscaping, the making of an artificial landscape, may include gardening and the designer may be a professional landscape architect.
Democracy
A democracy means "rule by the people". The name is used for different forms of government, where the people can take part in the decisions that affect the way their community is run. In modern times, there are different ways this can be done:
To become a stable democracy, a state usually undergoes a process of democratic consolidation.
A democracy is the opposite of a dictatorship, a type of government in which the power is centralized on the hands of a single person who rules the nation, lacks political pluralism, the people have no participation in the local politics and little to no freedom of expression.
After people hold an election, the candidates that won are determined. The way this is done can be simple: The candidate with the most votes gets elected. Very often, the politicians being elected belong to a political party. Instead of choosing a person, people vote for a party. The party with the most votes then picks the candidates.
Usually, the people being elected need to meet certain conditions: They need to have a certain age or a government body needs to determine that they are suitably qualified to perform the job.
Not everyone can vote in an election. Suffrage is only given to people who are citizens. Some groups may be excluded, for example prisoners.
For some elections, a country may make voting compulsory. Someone who does not vote, and who does not give a good reason usually has to pay a fine
Democracy may be direct or indirect.
In a direct democracy, everyone has the right to make laws together. One modern example of direct democracy is a referendum, which is the name for the kind of way to pass a law where everyone in the community votes on it. Direct democracies are not usually used to run countries, because it is hard to get millions of people to get together all the time to make laws and other decisions. There is not enough time.
In an indirect, or representative democracy, people choose representatives to make laws for them. These people can be mayors, councilmen, members of Parliament, or other government officials. This is a much more common kind of democracy. Large communities like cities and countries use this method, but it may not be needed for a small group.
This kind of government was developed long ago by the ancient Greeks in classical Athens. They had everyone who was a citizen (not slaves, women, foreigners, and children) get together in one area. The assembly would talk about what kinds of laws they wanted and voted on them. The Council would suggest the laws. All citizens were allowed in the assembly.
The Council were picked by draws (lottery). The participants in the Council would change every year and the number of people in the Council was at the most 500. For some offices the Athenian citizens would pick a leader by writing the name of their favorite candidate on a piece of stone or wood. The person with the most votes became the leader.
In the Middle Ages, there were many systems, although only a few people could join in at this time. The Parliament of England began from the Magna Carta, a document which said that the King's power was limited, and protected certain rights of the people. The first elected parliament was De Montfort's Parliament in England in 1265.
However, only a few people could actually join in. Parliament was chosen by only a few percent of the people (in 1780, fewer than 3% of people joined in). The ruler also had the power to call parliaments. After a long time, the power of Parliament began to grow. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the English Bill of Rights 1689 made Parliament more powerful. Later, the ruler became a symbol instead of having real power.
Democratic consolidation is the process by which a new democracy matures. Once mature, it is unlikely to revert to dictatorship rule without an external shock.
The idea is that unconsolidated democracies suffer from intermittent elections which are not free and fair. In other words, powerful groups are able to prevent the system working fairly.
Game
A game is something that people often do for fun. If so, it is different from work. Many sports are games, and there are many professional sports. In those cases, there is money to be made, because it is a type of entertainment.
There are different kinds of games using many kinds of equipment. For example, in video games, people often use controllers or their keyboard to control what happens on a screen, such as a television screens and computers ones too. In card games, players use playing cards. There are also games that use your body, such as the Kinect. Most games need equipment, but not always. Children's street games often need no equipment.
In board games, players may move pieces on a flat surface called a "board". The object of the game varies. In race-type games like ludo, the object is to reach the end first. In go the object is to surround more space. In soccer it is to score more goals. Some games have complicated rules, some have simple rules.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably the first academic philosopher to address the definition of the word "game". In his "Philosophical Investigations", Wittgenstein demonstrated that the elements (parts) of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to correctly define what games are. He concluded that people apply the term "game" to a range of different human activities that are related, but not closely related.