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people appear to 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 impress accuracy---one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they are capable of nothing 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 thusmastered 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 entera second-grade mathematics class without any serious 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 quantity is unchanged as water pours from a short 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(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 twoness that applies to any class of objects and is aprerequisite(先决条件) for doing anything more mathematically demanding than setting a table----is itself far from innate.
练习题：
Choose correct answers to the question:
1.After children have helped to set the table with impressive accuracy, they ______.
A.are able to help parents serve dishes
B.tend to do more complicated housework
C.are able to figure out the total pieces
D.can enter a second-grade mathematics class
2.It is _____to believe that the quality of water keeps unchanged when it is contained in two different glasses.
A.easy to persuade children
B.hard for most children
C.the innate of most children
D.difficult for both adults and children
3.It can be inferred from the passage that children are likely to _____when they are asked to count all the balls of different colors
A.give the accurate answer
B.count the balls of each color
C.be too confused to do anything
D.make minor mistakes
4.According to this passage,_____is mastered by birth.
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
5.What’s the author‘s attitude towards “children’s numerical skills”?
A.Critical.
B.Approving.
C.Questioning.
D.Objective.
