Have you ever counted the number of digits in your mobile phone number？ Your number has 11 digits. You may sometimes find it hard to remember your number. Thats because China has the longest mobile phone numbers in the world. Why is that？

你数过你的手机号码有多少位数字吗？有11位数字。你有时可能会觉得很难记住自己的手机号码，那是因为中国是世界上手机号码最长的国家，为什么呢？

The 11 digits can be divided into three parts. Each part has a different meaning. The first three numbers tell you which mobile phone service provider you are using. For example， 135 is for China Mobile Communications Corporation and 188 is for China Unicom. The fourth to the seventh digits tell you where the number is registered. And the last four digits are random.

这11位数字可以分为三个部分，每个部分表示的含义不同。前面3位数字告诉你使用的是哪个手机服务供应商。例如，135表示中国移动通信公司，188表示中国联通。 第4到第7位数字告诉你号码的注册地，最后四位数字是随机的。

The main reason for using 11 digits is that we have the largest population in the world. We once had 10 numbers. But as our population grew， there were not enough numbers for us to use. So we began to use 11 digits starting from 1999. Eleven digits can be used to make tens of billions of mobile phone numbers. Thats enough for each person to have seven or eight phone numbers to use in China.

使用11位数字的主要原因是我们有世界上最多的人口。我们以前用过10位数，但随着人口的增长，10位数已经不够用了。所以从1999年开始，我们开始使用11位数。11位数可以组成上百亿个手机号码，这样在中国每个人可以使用7到8个手机号码。

And mobile phone numbers can be recycled. Usually， the service provider will reuse a canceled number after three to six months. If you call a number that you havent contacted for a long time， you may find that its owner has changed.

手機号码是可以回收的。通常，如果一个号码3到6个月没有使用的话，服务供应商会重新分配。所以如果你拨通一个长期没有联系的号码，号码的主人可能已经变了。

Besides China， Britain and Japan also use 11-digit mobile phone numbers. But their numbers always start with 0. So they cannot create as many numbers as we can. Countries like the United States， Australia and India use phone numbers with 10 digits. Canadas mobile phone numbers are perhaps the shortest in the world： they use seven digits.

除了中国，英国和日本也使用11位数字。但他们的号码以0开头，所以不会创造出像我们这么多的号码。美国、澳大利亚和印度使用10位数字，而加拿大的手机号码可能是全世界最短的，只有7位数字。

Vocabulary

digit n. 数字，数位

divide v. 分割，分成……

register v. 登记;注册

recycle v. 回收利用;再利用