2. 外语
  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 t

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 t

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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.
According to this passage, _____ is mastered by birth.
选项 A、the ability to survive in a desert island
B、the way of setting tables
C、the basic principles of mathematics
D、the concept of oneness
答案B
解析 这道题目需要认真理解了文章的意思才能正确作答。第1段的主题是：有些数字概念是人天生就有的；第2段的主题是：有一些是后天学习获得的。B是第1段中明确给出的例子，因此这个例子应该支持该段的主题。A错误地理解了第1段最后举的例子。C和D在第2段最后提到，都不是先天获取的数学知识。
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大学英语四级

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