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

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问题    People appear to be born to compute. The numerical skills of children develop so early and so inexorably 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, spoons, and 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 serius problems of intellectual adjustment.
   Of course, the truth is not so simple. 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 short stout glass into a tall thin one. Psychologists have since demonstrated that young children, asked to count the pencils in a pile, readily report the number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxed into finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the rudiments 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 threenes that applies to any class of objects and is a prerequisite for doing anything more mathematically demanding than setting a table--is itself far from innate.
What does the passage mainly discuss?

选项 A、Trends in teaching mathematics to children.
B、The use of mathematics in child psychology.
C、The development of mathematical ability in children.
D、The fundamental concepts of mathematics that children must learn.

答案C

解析 本文主要讨论儿童数学能力的发展。作者在第一段说,人们的计算能力似乎与生俱来,孩子学会走路和谈话以后不久,他们就在桌子上设置餐具,计算餐具的数量,掌握了加法以后,他们继续学习减法。第二段说,研究表明,孩子们逐步地、努力地掌握数学基础知识。所以C。
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