Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 68 to 74.
First of all, you needed to find your ‘mobile phone’. This in itself could take some time. You should remember that these were the days before telephones were attached to the wall, so the chances of losing them were very high. Once you found your phone, you had to use your fingers to type a message into a tiny window. The messages often came out wrong, because everyone’s fingers were bigger than the keys, and even when they came out right it was hard to work out what they meant, as it became traditional to leave out all the vowels in order to save time.
But - and this is what seems so strange - you had absolutely no way of knowing whether the text had reached its destination, or whether the recipient had read it. Then came the invention of a telephone that allowed people to speak and be spoken to. Suddenly, conversations could take place between two people without any need for the tedious process of type, send, wait, read, type, send, and so on. It goes without saying that ‘texting’ soon turned into a thing of the past, though today you can sometimes still see people doing it in old movies and period dramas.
After the invention of the ‘speaking’ mobile phone, people started to long for a phone that would be impossible to lose. Thankfully, someone came up with the bright idea of inventing a telephone with a wire linking it to the wall, so that it always remained in the same place. ‘The invention of the Immobile Phone was one of the great breakthroughs of the age,’ says a leading historian. ‘For the first time, people could speak on the telephone without worrying about losing it or its battery running down.’ Yet, there was still room to make more progress. Was it possible to come up with a way of talking to other people that did not involve talking into a machine?
And then - out of the blue - came the discovery of face-to-face conversation. ‘It was extraordinary,’ remembers someone who was there at the time. ‘The human race was suddenly given this marvellous gift of talking to one another without needing to use a machine or a gadget.’ The world suddenly seemed so fresh. We had become so used to texting, and then to talking through mobiles, and then to talking through Immobiles, that we had no idea just how exciting it would be to talk to each other face-to-face. And there was no cost involved, no batteries, no problem with reception - it was all great!
(Adapted from Objective by Felicity O’Dell and Annie Broadhead)