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  3. People appear to be born to compute. The numerical skills of children develop so early and so inexorably (坚定地) that it is easy

People appear to be born to compute. The numerical skills of children develop so early and so inexorably (坚定地) that it is easy

admin2010-08-04  33
问题     People appear to be born to compute.  The numerical skills of children develop so early and so inexorably (坚定地) that it is easy to imagine an internal clock of mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long after learning to walk and talk, they can set the table with impressive accuracy--one plate, one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they are capable of noting that they have placed five knives, five spoons, and five forks on the table and, a bit later, that this amounts to fifteen pieces of silverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move on to subtraction.  It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a child were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years later, he or she could enter a second-grade mathematics class without any serious problems of intellectual adjustment.
    Of course, the truth is not so simple. In this century, the work of cognitive psychologists has illuminated the subtle forms of daily learning on which intellectual progress depends. Children were observed as they slowly grasped--or, as the case might be, bumped into--concepts that adults take for granted, as they refused, for instance, to concede that quantity is unchanged as water pours from a short stout glass into a tall thin one.    Psychologists have since demonstrated that young children, when asked to count the pencils in a pile, readily report the number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxed (说服) into finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the rudiments (基本原理) of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have also suggested that the very concept of abstract numbers--the idea of a oneness, a twoness, a threeness that applies to any class of objects and is prerequisite (先决条件) for doing anything more mathematically demanding than setting a table--is itself far from innate.
It can be inferred from the passage that children are likely to ________ when they are asked to count all the balls of different colors.
选项 A、give the accurate answer
B、count the balls of each color
C、be too confused to do anything
D、make minor mistakes
答案B
解析 文章是以pencils为例进行说明的，题目中换成了 balls，但是目的是相同的，都是为了表述儿童更愿意根据颜色的不同来数数，而不是数总数，故选项B正确。
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