HowTo: Ask questions in Bash?

I've been writing some script to configure some firewall and came up with this way of asking a question in Bash. I hope it helps as an example. Feel free to contribute your own:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

ask() {
    local query=$1

    if ( echo $query | grep -qi password ); then
        read -s -p "$query: " answer
        echo
    else
        read -p "$query: " answer
    fi

    return 0
}

ask 'What is your name?'

echo
echo "Hello, $answer"

ask 'Please, give me your password'

echo
echo "Access granted"

As you can devise from the script, "$answer" is a global; which will get overwritten if you use ask() again. In case you want to make several questions, just reassign the var to another one:

ask 'What is your first name?'
firstname=${answer^}

ask 'What is your last name?'
lastname=${answer^}

echo
echo "Nice to meet you, $firstname $lastname!"

So, this gives you an idea. I'd check this article to learn some defensive Bash programming; which I am just starting to absorb: http://www.kfirlavi.com/blog/2012/11/14/defensive-bash-programming/