托福阅读背景知识：盘点人类忌讳的数字.docxVIP

智课网TOEFL备考资料托福阅读背景知识：盘点人类忌讳的数字 摘要： 托福阅读背景知识：盘点人类忌讳的数字 。背景知识在托福考试中发挥着重要的作用，很多考生都是通过背景知识了解托福考试的，希望小编整理的这一系列背景知识对大家能有所帮助。 Everyone can agree that 1+1=2. But the idea that 7 is greater than 13 -- that some numbers are luckier than others -- makes no sense to some people. Such numerical biases can cause deep divisions. And that is what happened earlier this month in Hong Kong. Property developer Henderson Land Development Co. made news for selling a condominium for $56.6 million, a price the developer called a residential record in Asia. But after that sale was announced, the property began making news for other unusual numbers. Henderson is labeling the floors of its property at 39 Conduit Road with numbers that increase, but not in the conventional 1-then-2 way. The floor above 39, for example, is 60. And the top three floors are consecutively labeled 66, 68 and 88. This offended some peoples sense of order. At a protest Sunday against high housing prices, Hong Kong Democratic Party legislators expressed dissatisfaction with the numbering schemes tenuous relationship to reality. You could call the ground floor the 88th floor, but its meaningless, says Emily Lau. When you say you live on the 88th floor, people expect you to be on the 88th floor, not the 10th floor or something. Numerology, a belief that certain digits have greater meaning beyond merely their quantity, has long been been viewed as a kind of loony uncle to mathematics. Numerologists favor or fear certain numbers depending on factors such as the sound of the words for those numbers or the letter in the alphabet they correspond to. That kind of reasoning leads some mathematicians, who are governed by numerical laws and properties, to believe they have one up on numerologists. But many mathematicians have their own emotional attachments to numbers that drove them to enter the field in the first place. Some will cop to having numerical crushes that might not look that different from numerolo