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“Hello” is a relatively new greeting. It first appeared sometime in the mid-1800s, but many people w...
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“Hello” is a relatively new greeting. It first appeared sometime in the mid-1800s, but many people would not have dreamed of using it. “Hello” was considered a very impolite way to greet someone. Instead, people used formal expressions like “How do you do?”
Back then, there were several words that sounded like “hello,” but they were used to get someone’s attention or to express surprise. For example, if you caught your little brother stealing your snack, you might have said, “Halloa there! Stop eating my cheese!” If you found a fly in your soup, you might have shouted, “Hullo! How did that get in there?”
Everything started to change in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. The first telephones didn’t have numbers you could dial, nor did they have bells or ringers. Instead, your telephone sent signals along telephone lines to a central office where an operator would answer by saying something like “Are you there, sir?” or “What is wanted?” The operator would then connect your phone to the phone of the person you wanted to reach. There was just one small problem: Since telephones didn’t ring, how would the person you were calling know that you were “on the line”? The answer is you would yell (大喊) into your phone and hope someone on the other end heard you. But what would you yell? And what would the person you were calling say when they were going to answer? Bell suggested “Ahoy! Ahoy!” but it didn’t catch on. Then the famous inventor Thomas Edison suggested the word hello. That caught on right away.
“Hello” became so popular that by 1878 telephone operators were required to use it. In fact, operators received the nickname (绰号) “Hello Girls.” Soon, “hello” became not just the standard way to answer the phone, but an accepted way to greet people in person.
1.Why was “hello” seldom used when it first appeared?
A. It was too informal.
B. It was hard to pronounce.
C. It was considered to be rude.
D. There were other words like “hello”.
2.“Hullo” was used to show something _____.
A. interesting B. exciting
C. boring D. unexpected
3.Paragraph 3 is mainly about _____.
A. how “hello” was used to answer the telephone
B. the friendship between Bell and Edison
C. the invention of the telephone
D. how the telephone improved
4.We can infer from the text that _____.
A. “hello” got popular as soon as the telephone was invented
B. the telephone has changed the way people speak
C. people liked simple expressions like “hello”
D. Bell advised girls to use “hello”
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