Genius
The greatest results in life are attained by simple means, and the exercise of ordinary qualities. The common life of every day, with its cares, necessities, and duties, affords ample opportunity for acquiring experience of the best kind; and 41. its most beaten paths provide the true worker with abundant scope for effort and room for self-improvement. 42. The road of human welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast well-doing; and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest: spirit, will usually be the most successful.
Fortune has often been blamed for her blindness; but fortune is not so blind as men are. 43. Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators. In the pursuit of even the highest branches of human inquiry, the commoner qualities are found the most useful, such as common sense, attention, application, and perseverance.
Genius may not be necessary, though even genius of the highest sort does not disdain the use of these ordinary qualities. 44. The very greatest men have been among the least believers in the power of genius, and as worldly wise and persevering as successful men of the commoner sort. 45. Some have even defined genius to be only common sense intensified. A distinguished teacher and president of a college spoke of it as the power of making efforts. John Foster held it to be the power of lighting one's own fire. Buffon said of genius "it is patience".
(41)
相关问题推荐
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Why does freshman English remain the only common course of American college students？ While within recent memory, requirements such as a foreign language and a course in western civilization made part of a common set of courses for the over-whelming majority of freshman students, only composition has survived to define the nationally agreed on minimum for the meaning of the liberal arts and science.
But not even the defeated defenders of the old requirements claimed that one gained from them any more than the "language" of the discipline involved--a way of "talking", of asking questions and discussing possible answers to them.
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是不是有的人天生聪明，而有的人天生就愚笨呢？还有，人的智力是由环境和经历造就的吗？令人吃惊的是这两个问题的答案都是肯定的。在某种程度上，人的智力是天赋的。对一个先天弱智的儿童无论进行多少特殊教育也无法使其变为天才。另一方面，一个生活在枯燥单调环境中的孩子的智力发展往往不如生活在富有和丰富多彩环境中的孩子。由此可见，一个人的智力极限是与生俱来的，但他能否达到其智力极限则取决于环境。这个为当今绝大多数专家所赞同的观点可以从几个方面得到论证。
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Earthquakes
At two minutes to noon in September 1 of 1923, the great clock in Tokyo stopped. 67. Tokyo Bay Shook as if huge rug had been pulled from under it. 68. Towered above the bay, the 4,000 meter Mount Fuji stood above a deep trench in the sea. 69. It was from this trench where the earthquake came, at a magnitude of 8. 3 on the Richter scale.Huge waves swept over the city. 70. Boats were driven inland, and buildings and people were dragged out sea. 71. The tremors dislodged part of a hillside, which gave way, brushing trains, stations and bodies the water below. 72. Three massive shocks wrecked the of Tokyo and Yokohama and, during the next six hours, there were more than 100 aftershocks.
The casualties were enormous, but there were also some lucky survivors. 73. The most remarkably was a woman who was having a bath in her room at the Tokyo Grand Hotel. 74. As for the hotel collapsed, she and her bath gracefully descended to the street, 75. leave both her and the bath water intact.
(66)
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"The Child is Father of the Man," wrote the English poet William Wordsworth. 111. Adults today are as aware as Wordsworth of the importance of childhood experiences that a cherished and well-behaved child has a better chance of growing into a balanced, loving and law-abiding adult than an unloved one. The Children Act of 1989, created to give children much-needed protection against abuse, in the process legalized the ideology: the child comes first.
But while the nurturing of self-esteem in children is now accepted as a requisite of their development, the social and economic demands on over-worked, harassed parents often prevent them from putting this theory into practice where it matters most in the home. Indeed, much of the time it seems that parents themselves are suffering a crisis of self-esteem.Reports show that teenagers are increasingly obese and slothful. They watch on average between four and six hours of television a day. 113. No longer subject to the discipline of the evening family meal-the cradle of manners and civil behavior-one in three people eats his or her dinner in front of the television. The fashion industry is increasingly targeting guilty parents and their demanding children; it is not uncommon to see children wearing designer jeans and the latest trainers that they will soon grow out of.
Pre-Christmas toy advertising is designed to strike terror into the hearts of parents and make their children even more demanding and greedy. Every office in the land harbors parents who are exasperated especially by boys who are arrogant, rude, boastful and undisciplined. 115. Many parents are too guilt-ridden or too bewildered by conflicting child rearing advice to do anything other than wring their hands with worry. The language of civil rights has entered childhood. Children as young as six are now so keenly aware of their "rights" that they freely complain of "unfair" treatment by their elders.(111)
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The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind: it is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about and given precise and exact explanations. The difference between the operations and methods of a baker weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist by means of his balance is not that the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but that the latter is a much finer apparatus and of course much more accurate in its measurement than the former.
Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion of a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.