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An essential ingredient of many sports is a player’s ability to react. If you were a professional tennis player, how much time would you have to react if an opposing player served a ball to you? If you were a professional baseball player, how long would you have to react as a batter against a pitcher who throws only fastballs? Which player has more time?
What To Do
Use the Internet to learn the length of a tennis court and the distance on a baseball field from the pitcher’s mound to home plate. Also, find the speed at which a top tennis player serves the ball and the speed at which a top baseball pitcher throws the ball.
Search Engine Keywords
ATP tennis
United States Tennis Association
Major League Baseball
tennis court dimensions
baseball field dimensions |
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Materials
calculator
Complete the Activity
Use the dimensions and speed data you collected to determine, in seconds, the length of time it takes a served tennis ball to travel from one end of the court to the other, and the length of time in seconds it takes a baseball to travel from the pitcher’s mound to home plate. One way to accomplish this computation is to convert the speed of the ball in miles per hour to feet per second, and then use a proportion to find the elapsed time for a given distance.
Share Your Work
If possible, devise a way to demonstrate each length of time to your classmates. |