江苏省赣榆县智贤中学高中英语牛津版选修7 Unit 1 Living with technology 同步练习（一） .docVIP

Unit1 Living with technology 同步练习 一 总分 100分 时间 40 分钟 成绩评定 __________________ I. 阅读短文，回答后面问题（共30分）B TELEPHONES How a telephone works is a question which not everyone can answer. When you speak into the telephone, the sound waves of your voice are turned into electrical signals. The signal is sent down a pair of wires to the receiving telephone. There the electrical signal is changed back into sound. The earliest telephones were not popular and it took a long time before people began to hire or buy them. At the beginning it was difficult to hear people over long distances. The wires which carried the telephone conversations were thick, heavy and expensive. In those days, to make a call, you had to wind a handle at the side of your telephone. This produced enough electricity to make your call. You called the operator and told her which number you wanted. The operator connected the two numbers and made a note of the length of the telephone call and the charge. The first telephone directory was printed in a town in the USA in 1878. It was just one piece of paper, printed on one side. In 1877 there were only 2,600 telephones in the world. By 2000 there were over 400 million. There have been great advances in telephone equipment in the last quarter of the twentieth century. For example, radio waves can be used to send telephone signals over long distances, often by satellite. The problem with electrical signals is that they get weaker and weaker as they gavel along metal wires. They need to be strengthened every 3-4 km. Light signals, however, can travel 150 km without getting weaker, and their signal is clearer too. So nowadays, instead of using metal wires to send electrical signals, very thin glass pipes, about 1 mm wide, are used to send light signals. A person’s voice is changed into electrical signals. These electrical signals are turned into light signals which are sent down the thin “pipe”. At the other end, the light signals are received and changed back into el