不知您有没有仔细观察过我们天天使用的电话：它的按键排列，0是在最下方的。不是应该越小的数字越应该排在前面吗？为什么电话的按键布局这么特别呢？下面这篇文章就将为您解释这个问题。
Mechanical adding machines, based on rotating wheels, always have the 0 button adjacent to the 1 button. By convention, most old adding machines had the numbers increasing in value from the bottom. When the numbers were put onto a pad arranged as a 3 by 3 grid with one left over, the order of the numbers was kept the same.
On a rotary telephone dial, the 0 comes adjacent to the 9 because a 0 in the telephone number is signaled by 10 pulses on the line. When telephones acquired push buttons in a grid, the ordering of the buttons was carried over from the old telephone dial.
Vocabulary:
adjacent: 邻近的
