Q5.
Speed isn’t always a good thing. Many fans are complaining that the speed of the game is making tennis
boring to watch. After two years of testing, a new ball has now been invented which could slow down
tennis and make it more exciting to watch. The ball is put together in exactly the same way as the one used
now, but is 6% larger in diameter. The bigger ball gives the receiver 10% more reaction time in which to
return the serve. So the number of aces — serves in a match that the receiver fails to return — will be far
fewer.
Q6.
When Irishman John Boland travelled to Athens for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, he had no
idea he would return home with the gold medal in tennis. But then, he had no idea he would compete either
— he went to watch the competion. In comparison, today’s Olympic tennis players include some of the
best athletes in the world. They are used to five-star hotels and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but at the
Olympic Games they will stay in the Olympic Village and compete for nothing but a gold medal.
Q7.
The Wimbledon tennis tournament is famous for pigeons that sometimes come flying on to Centre Court
and stop the game. So, producers of a video tennis game designed for PlayStation2 decided to use specially
trained homing pigeons, decorated with the game’s logo. Twenty birds will be spray-painted with the
Virtual Tennis 2 logo and trained to fly in and out of the home of British tennis during the matches of the
Wimbledon championship. The advertising pigeons will go straight for the fans and show their logos to
them.