When I asked my daughter which item 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 entirely, which makes me unusual. Because the telephone is changing our lives more than any other piece of technology. 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 pm and then spends an hour on the phone talking to the very people she has been at school with all day. If the phone did not exist, would she have anything to talk about? Point 2 The mobile phone means that we are never alone. “The mobile saved my life,”says Crystal Johnstone. She had an accident in her Volvo on the A45 between Otley and Skipton. Trapped inside, she managed to make the call that brought the ambulance(救护车) to her rescue. Point 3 The mobile removes our secret. It allows marketing manager of Haba Deutsch, Carl Nicolaisen, to ring his sales staff all round the world at and time of day to ask where they are , where they are going, and how their last meeting went. Point 4 The telephone separates us. Antonella Bramante 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 complete strangers simultaneously ( 同时地) on chat lines (at least my daughter does. I wouldn’t know what to talk about). 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 access(存取) the Internet, the biggest library on Earth.