A. accounted  B. limited   C. commercials  D. popular  E. overnight      F. helped       G. increased     H. symbols   I. though         J. talented   K. fashion

The next time you watch NBA playoff action on TV, take a close look at the shoes that many players are wearing . Gone, for the most part, are the ankle-hugging high-tops that supposedly _______ to protect players from injury.
The change over the last few years to low-top sneakers(运动鞋) seems to go against conventional wisdom. Strangely, _____, Steven Nash and Kobe Bryant, two of the most ___
players with the Los Angeles Lakers, aren’t worried.
According to the US market-research firm NPD Group, high-tops once ____ for about 20 percent of the US basketball shoe market. Now, the number has sunk to about 8 percent. Low-tops, the kind that Nash and Bryant wear, have grown to 29 percent, from just 11 percent in 2002.
High-top sneakers are one of the most celebrated ____ in modern basketball. After the 1985 Air Jordans so transformed the market, shoe companies began battling one another. They put air pumps in the tongues of their shoes and made carefully prepared and organized __.
“All of a sudden it became a ___ business,” Marshal Cohen, an analyst with NPD group, told The Wall Street Journal. The Jordans were excellent. The market went from being nothing to a million-dollar business _____.”
One of the reasons high-tops are not so ___ anymore is that they were never really very good at protecting the feet.
In an article in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2008, University of Newcastle researcher Craig Richards found no evidence that sneakers__ injuries. His research actually found that high-top basketball sneakers could even cause players to run slower and jump lower. Now, the contest has become a war. Companies like Adidas, Nike, Converse and Reebok are all fighting to create the next “Air Jordan,” and with the next market battle.