Twenty-four teams will take part in this year’s Squareball World Cup tournament. In the first stage of the tournament the teams will compete in four groups of six. Within each group all the teams will play each other once. The top two teams from each group will progress to the second stage, where they will compete in a single league. Here, each team will carry forward the result from the match against the team they have already played in their group and play each of the other teams once. The top two teams at the end of the second stage will play again in the final to determine the winners of the Cup. How many matches will be played altogether during this year’s Squareball World Cup tournament?

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant