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.
It con be inferred from the passage that children onrmally learn simple counting ______.

选项 A、soon after they learn to talk
B、by looking at the clock
C、when they begin to be mathematically mature
D、after they reach the second grade in school

答案A

解析 根据短文可以推断,孩子通常在学会谈话之后不久,便学习简单的计算。关于这一点,第一段第三句讲得最清楚。
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