Exercise 1. What do these dates mean to the history of the telephone?

1627, 1831, 1854, 1876

Exercise 2. Say whether these sentences are true or false and explain why.

1. People never wanted to communicate from afar.

2. People have used birds to get a message from one point to another.

3. Francis Bacon predicted the telephone in his book New Utopia.

4. A real telephone could be invented only at the electrical age.

5. The telephone was invented in 1854.

6. The telephone was invented by two people working together: Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray.

7. Two men rushed to the patent office within hours of each other, but Elisha Gray patented his telephone first.

8. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson independently designed two telephones.

9. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell had an illegal battle over the invention of the telephone.

10. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t win the battle over the invention of the telephone.

11. Bell's success with the telephone came as a result of his knowledge both of the electricity and of acoustics.

12. Bell developed new and original ideas completely alone.

13. The rewards for the invention are equally shared between Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson.

Exercise 3. Do you know how people used smoke signals, mirrors, jungle drums, carrier pigeons and semaphores to get a message from one point to another? Try to guess and describe.

Exercise 4. Read the second part of the UNIT. Find examples from the article of how the phone:

A. improves our life

B. makes it worse.

How does the phone affect your life?

Exercise 5. Who of the people from the list said or meant the following.

Martha Vann, Alexandra Pappas, Crystal Johnstone, Carl Nicolaisen, Philip Maurice.

1. The mobile is useful for people of my profession.

2. The telephone is changing our lives more than any other piece of technology.

3. The mobile phone means that we are never alone which is good.

4. My daughter adores telephone.

5. The mobile saved my life.

6. The phone allows you to talk to several people at the same time.

7. I can easily live without the phone.

8. We can talk to astronauts while they're space-walking.

9. The telephone creates the need to communicate.

10. Women like talking on the phone more then men.