After reading the passage below, answer the questions that follow. Be sure to "submit" your response for each question. You will initially receive full credit for each question, but your grade may change once your instructor reviews your responses. Be sure to check the grade book for your final grade.
The Quiet Zone
Take away all the mobile phones. With no phone to look at, people lose their “mobile phone hunch” and have nothing to do but meet the eyes of other phone-less people. They connect and communicate. Do you want to go to the National Radio Quiet Zone? If so, you’ll have to drive the backroads of West Virginia to find those 13,000 square miles of mountainous terrain — and if you hit Green Bank, you’ll have found a town with the strictest ban on technology in the United States: no mobile phones, no Wi-Fi, no microwave ovens — nothing that generates electromagnetic signals.
Green Bank is not backward; in fact, its purpose is to protect powerful radio telescopes at the Green Bank Observatory that have been called superhuman ears (Kennedy, 2019). The telescopes need electromagnetic signals blocked in order to tune into frequencies across the spectrum so that astronomers can study things like stardust and the death throes of a star, and so that physicists can measure gravitational waves without interference that would contaminate — or completely block — their signals.
While the scientific advantages are huge in Green Bank, there are personal benefits, too. People talk to one another, listen to one another’s stories, or simply disconnect and experience a world of solitude where they can “hear” their own thoughts.