Write a summary of the text you just read. use details from the reading to support your answer.
the secret of cell phones
by r. howard
maria was very excited: her parents were finally going to buy her a cell phone. most of her friends had
already been given a cell phone and were able to talk all the time, even when they weren't in school.
their parents mostly got them for "emergencies." all of maria's friends were very careful with their
phones and didn't like to let other people (even maria) play games or send text messages on their
personal phones. maria's parents relied on maria's friends if they needed to get in touch with maria and
to make sure she got home all right after school if they were still at work.
maria and her parents went to the electronics store one saturday to pick out the phone. there were so
many options to choose from: phones that flipped open, big chunky ones that looked very old,
rectangular phones with touch screens, square phones with buttons, heavy phones that had touch
screens and buttons. maria picked out one of the rectangular touch screen phones and immediately
began to play with it, wondering at how it all worked, sliding her thumb from side to side to lock it.
when she got home, she immediately called her best friend jennifer. "i got the phone! " she said.
"what's your cell phone number? "
after inputting the number into the contacts list, maria sent jennifer a text message: "look now we can
text." it took a few moments for the message to go through. once it did, and the two girls started talking
via text message, maria began to think about what was happening. how did the words that she typed
into the keypad on her phone show up in the same exact way on jennifer's phone? jennifer lived
almost five whole miles from maria (they had counted the exact distance one summer). how did the
words travel so far and so quickly?
readworks. org · © 2013 readworks®, inc. all rights reserved.
the secret of cell phones
once maria thought of these questions, so many others popped up in her head. for example, maria's mom sent so many emails to maria's grandmother, who lived in florida. mom attached pictures of maria to most of the emails she sent to grandma, since maria didn't get to see grandma very often. there was so much to think about with the pictures! first, how did the pictures get onto the computer from the camera in the first place? second, how were the pictures able to be attached to the email? lastly, how did each picture-with all the parts of maria and whatever background maria was standing in front of-go from the new york email to the florida email? maria knew all about using the different usb ports and clicking the right buttons to attach pictures, but now she wondered about how the data was actually sent from the camera to the computer to the email, and then from mom's email to grandma's email. maria decided to ask her parents about it later. it was all very confusing, especially when maria thought back to the time period she was learning about in school, the late 1700s, when america was becoming the united states. for example, if the settlers had cell phones and computers and gps, paul revere would not have needed to go horseback riding all over the colonies telling people that the british were coming. he could have just called someone in boston to let him know what was going on. then maria thought about making phone calls. when she was little, she and her cousins had made "telephones" out of empty tin cans and string. the vibrations of their voices had carried through the cans and onto the string so that the other person could hear the words from the other end of the line. but cell phones and telephones did not have any string attached to them-and you could call people hundreds of miles away and hear them perfectly. she called her cousins in mexico all the time! how did they hear the words she said in new york if their phones weren't connected? sometimes she had to leave voice messages for her cousins, if they weren't able to come to the phone. that was also a strange thing: how did the words she said in one moment into a voice mailbox get saved until her cousins were ready to listen? maria knew that telephones and cell phones and computers were considered "high tech devices" that you had to buy in special stores. but how did they do what they did? how did they convert the words she said and the pictures her mom sent (maria knew this stuff was called data) into the appropriate form that they were supposed to be in? this was definitely something to ask her dad. in the meantime, maria decided to send jennifer a funny picture of herself and her dog spotty