Read the following passage. The passage is followed by several questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that fitrs best according to the information given in the passage you have just read.
Maybe I'm the rude one for not appreciating life's little courtesies(礼貌). But many social norms just don't make sense to people drowning in digital communication.
Take the thank-you note. Daniel Post Senning, a great-great-grandson of Emily Post and a coauthor of the 18th edition of Emily Post's Etiquette, asked, "At what point does showing appreciation outweigh the cost?"
Then there is voice mail, a now impolite way of trying to connect. Think of how long it takes to listen to one of those long-winded messages. In texts, you don't have to declare who you are or even say hello. E-mail, too, is slower than a text. Which leads to the worst offenders of all: those who leave a voice mail and then send an e-mail message to tell you they left a voice mail.
My father learned this lesson after leaving me a dozen voice mail messages, none of which I listened to. Annoyed, he called my sister to complain that I never returned his phone calls. "Why are you leaving him voice mails?" my sister asked. "Just text him."
This isn't the first time technology has changed our manners. In the late 1870s, when the telephone was invented, people didn't know how to greet a caller. Often there was just silence. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, suggested that people say, "Ahoy!" Eventually" hello" won out, and the victory quickened the greeting's use in face-to-face communications.
In the age of the smartphone, there is no reason to ask once-acceptable questions about: the weather forecast, a business's phone number, a store's hours, or directions to a house, a restaurant, or an office, which can be easily found on Google Maps. But people still ask these things. And when you answer, they respond with a thank-you e-mail.
How to handle these differing standards? Easy: Consider your audience. Some people, especially older ones, appreciate a thank-you message. Others, like me, want no reply.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that in traditional societies, the young learn from the old. But in modern societies, the old can also learn from the young. Here's hoping that politeness never goes out of fashion but that time-wasting forms of communication do.