--- title: Phones and computer chips — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Phones and computer chips», a lesson of the technology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Inside your phone is a computer chip smaller than a fingernail holding billions of tiny switches, printed with light onto a thin slice of sil --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Technology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/) / Phones and computer chips # Phones and computer chips Lesson 9 of the technology course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/0/) — Inside your phone is a computer chip smaller than a fingernail holding billions of tiny switches, printed with light onto a thin slice of silicon, which comes from sand made extremely pure. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/1/) — Chips are made in clean rooms with far less dust in the air than a hospital operating room, and workers wear full "bunny suits", because one speck of dust can ruin a chip. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/2/) — A phone is put together from parts made by many companies in many countries: screens, batteries, cameras, chips and cases meet in big assembly factories, many of them in China, India and Vietnam. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/3/) — Your phone also holds metals dug from mines around the world, such as lithium, cobalt, copper and gold, so an old phone in a drawer is a little treasure chest worth recycling. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/5/) — A computer chip has billions of tiny switches printed layer by layer with light onto very pure silicon; the newest chips are described in nanometres, billionths of a metre. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/6/) — Big chip makers include TSMC in Taiwan, Samsung and Intel. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/7/) — Chip clean rooms filter their air all the time, so there is far less dust than in a hospital operating room, and workers wear full bunny suits because one speck can ruin a chip. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/8/) — Silicon comes from sand made extremely pure; it is melted and a big crystal is slowly pulled out as a cylinder, then sliced into thin shiny discs called wafers. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/9/) — Smartphones are assembled from parts made by many companies, in big factories many of them in China, India and Vietnam, and one phone contains dozens of different chemical elements. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/10/) — A phone screen has tough glass over layers of tiny coloured lights and a see-through grid that senses where your finger is by a small electric change. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/11/) — Touch screens do not work with most gloves because they need the electricity of your skin; a cracked screen can cut fingers, so cover it until it is fixed. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/12/) — A circuit board is a green board with copper tracks; robots place tiny parts, tens of thousands an hour, and an oven melts solder, a metal that melts easily, to fix them. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/13/) — Phones need metals like lithium, cobalt, copper and gold from mines in many countries; some mines have been unsafe or used child labour, so companies are pushed to check their suppliers. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/15/) — Phones are checked before sale: screens, cameras, buttons, speakers and batteries are tested, and in test labs some phones are dropped, bent and dunked in water on purpose. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/16/) — Old phones are taken apart, their batteries removed safely and their metals melted out and reused; phones and batteries must never go in the household bin because they can catch fire. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/17/) — Under each laptop key is a tiny switch on a thin layer of circuits; pressing it closes a contact and the computer reads which key it was, and spilled drinks can ruin a laptop. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/9-phones-and-computer-chips/18/) — The QWERTY order of keys comes from typewriters of the 1870s; a popular story says it slowed typists so the keys would not jam, but historians still argue about the real reason. - ← previous: [How a car is built](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/8-how-a-car-is-built/) - next →: [Keeping cold: fridges, freezers and heat pumps](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/10-keeping-cold-fridges-freezers-and-heat-pumps/) - ↑ back to [Technology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/)