大学英语精读第3册第2单元课文fruitfulquestions翻译.docVIP

fruitful questions The other night at the dinner table, my three kids-ages 9, 6 and 4-took time out from their food fight to teach me about paradigm shifts, the limitations of linear thinking and how to refocus parameters. Heres how it happened: We were playing our own oral version of the Sesame Street game, What Doesnt Belong?, where kids look at three pictures and choose the one that doesnt fit. I said, OK, what doesnt belong, an orange, a tomato or a strawberry? The oldest didnt take more than a second to deliver his smug answer: Tomato because the other two are fruits. I agreed that this was the right answer despite the fact that some purists insist a tomato is a fruit. To those of us forced as kids to eat them in salads, tomatoes will always be vegetables. I was about to think up another set of three when my 4-year-old said, The right answer is strawberry because the other two are round and a strawberry isnt. How could I argue with that? Then my 6-year old said, Its the orange because the other two are red. Not to be outdone by his younger siblings, the 9-year old said, It could also be the orange because the other two grow on vines. The middle one took this as a direct challenge. It could be the strawberry because its the only one you put on ice cream. Something was definitely happening here. It was messier than a food fight and much more important than whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable. My kids were doing what Copernicus did when he placed the sun at the center of the universe, readjusting the centuries-old paradigm of an Earth-centered system. They were doing what Reuben Mattus did when he renamed his Bronx ice cream Haagen-Dazs and raised the price without changing the product. They were doing what Edward Jenner did when he discovered a vaccination for smallpox by abandoning his quest for a cure. Instead of studying people who were sick with smallpox, he began to study people who were exposed to it but never got sick. He found tha