Экзаменационный (типовой) материал ЕГЭ / Английский / 10 задание / 24

A. By now Wimbledon has become a popular national festival, together with Ascot and the Cup Final. Many people in Britain don’t know that tennis was first played in Wales. It was there, in 1873, that Major Walter Wingfield played a game with the recently invented rubber balls and enjoyed it so much, that he decided to develop the standards of the game. He published the first book of tennis rules later that year. The first Wimbledon championship was held a few years later in 1877 and the British Lawn Tennis Association formed in 1888.
 

B. Good mental preparation is necessary for professional tennis players. In a long match they can be on the court for several hours with nobody to talk to. There can be hundreds of stops from the crowd, their opponent and, especially at Wimbledon, the rain. Players need to practice methods for improving their concentration and for motivating themselves when the game is going against them. They are often taught to imagine some situations, such as a tense tie-break. Then they imagine what to do with it.
 

C. Many players find it impossible to stay calm in the stressful situation of a long tennis match and let their temper out. John McEnroe was famous for his quarrels with referees. Several players have been given warnings for throwing the racket or swearing. Some players lose matches they could easily win because their mind lets them down. Pat Rafter said that he couldn’t breathe in his 2000 Wimbledon final. The stress of being near the victory can be too much for a person.
 

D. The power of today’s tennis game is only partly created by the athletes themselves. Much of it comes from their rackets. New designs mean players can hit the ball with more speed and accuracy than ever before. It started in the 1970s when the traditional wooden racket was replaced with metal. Since then different materials have been used. Graphite has made the biggest influence. Now the graphite can be mixed with materials such as boron and titanium to produce even stronger, and lighter, rackets.
 

E. 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.
 

F. 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.
 

G. 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 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.