Unlike the other four senses, the sense organs for touch are distributed all over the body. Your other senses respond only to one type of stimulus while touch is sensitive to both temperature and pain. In fact, it is perhaps easiest to think of touch as a group of senses, of which several have special end organs or nerve endings situated in your skin, muscles and elsewhere which respond to a variety of stimulus and convey their impressions to the brain.
Your sense of touch enables you to do many things. With it you can feel a touch or stroke; estimate, without looking, the size and shape of objects; judge the heaviness of objects; tell whether something is hard or soft, hot or cold and whether or not it causes pain. Touch also gives you a sense of locality, which means you can tell, without having to look, the position of any part of your body.
Touch sometimes acts as your body's early warning system: the sensations of temperature and pain that your body is in danger before you are of any danger and your body will react immediately to protect itself before it is seriously hurt or damaged.
Touch can also help us to express a wide range of emotions we might not be able to convey in any other way. In many ways our sense of touch is the sense in which we place the most faith as sometimes it is not until we can actually touch something that we are convinced of its existence. For a baby this form of communication is particularly important because touching lets him know that someone is there and loves him.
1. According to the passage, baby needs touching mainly because _______.
A. he wants to communicate with other people
B. he wants to satisfy his emotional need
C. he wants to find the things he needs
D. he wants to know the existence of something
2. The major point discussed in this passage is _______.
A. the location of the sense of touch
B. touch and other senses
C. characteristics of touch
D. the role of touch