Lets say you have a page that displays items from some kind of a lookup. So the requested resource is www.example.com/page.php?display=news.
In this case you can use something like RewriteRule ^/news/$ page.php?display=news This way you can create friendly URLs for different resources which might need a query string value passed in.
Lets say you want to make this generic. So display can have values news, about, company which map to the urls /news/ /about/ /company/ then you simply change your rule to
RewriteRule ^/([^/]+)/?$ page.php?display=$1
You can also use this second method to say change your shopping cart system's URLs to a friendly one. Say your shopping cart uses a query string like - shop.php?category=1&product=10. You can convert this into a URL like shop/category/1/product/10. The rule would be
RewriteRule ^shop/category/([^/]+)/product/([^/]+)$ shop.php?category=$1&product=$2