Passage A
When I asked my daughter what she would keep: the phone, the car, the cooker, the computer, the TV, or her boyfriend, she said “the phone”. Personally, I could do without the phone, which makes me unusual, because the telephone is changing our lives.
Point 1 The telephone creates the need to communicate, in the same way that more roads create more traffic. My daughter comes home from school at 4:00 p.m. and then spends an hour on the phone talking to the very people she has been at school with all day.
Point 2 The mobile phone means that we are never alone. “The mobile saved my life,” says Johnston. She had an accident in her Volvo on the A45. Trapped inside, she managed to make the call that brought in doctors.
Point 3 The mobile removes our secret. It allows marketing manager of Deutsch to ring his sales staff all round the world to ask where they are, where they are going, and how their last meeting went.
Point 4 The telephone separates us. Anton Ella in Rome says, “We worked in separate offices but I could see him through the window. It was easy to get his number. We were so near——but we didn’t meet for the first two weeks!”
Point 5 The telephone allows us to reach out beyond our own lives. Today we can talk to several strangers at the same time on chat lines. We can talk across the world. We can even talk to astronauts (if you know any) while they’re space-walking. And, with the phone line hooked up to the computer, we can reach the Internet, the biggest library on Earth.
1. It is possible to talk to several complete strangers at the same time through_______.
Athe TV screen
Ba fax machine
Cthe phone line linked to the computer
Da microphone
