Unit 7 The Art of Smart Guessing翻译.doc

Unit 7 The Art of Smart GuessingBryan W. Mattimore1. Several years ago, interviewing candidates for a job, I grew tired of asking what experience do you have? So I decided on a one-question quiz to find out how resourceful a thinker the new hire might be. Here it is:2.You are on a yacht sailing the Pacific Ocean. Your navigator announces you are over the deepest point, the Mariana Trench. Just then, a clumsy guest accidentally drops a 12-pound cannonball over the side. How long will it take for the cannonball to reach the bottom of the Ocean?3.Before reading on, please try to solve this yourself paying special attention to how you might solve it.4.Did you make a completely wild guess because there wasnt enough information? Did you get too bogged down in the details trying to come up with the exactly right answer? Or did you zero in on the two most important problems how deep is the Mariana Trench and how fast might a cannonball fall through the water then hazard a guesstimate?5.Most of my candidates simply made a wild guess, thinking that they couldnt be 100-percent right. Rarely was someone willing to risk an approximation. 6.What does this have to do with business or creativity? A great deal. In the real world, we frequently need to make decisions when the full information does not exist. From what foods we eat to how to raise our kids, creative people must think for themselves. There may not be the time or the money to make sure of all your decisions. Your best guess will often be the best you can do.7.Suppose, for example, youve been asked to write a marketing plan for a new telephone device that will send your name, company, address and telephone number to a visual display or printer on another persons phone. In addition to conventional outlets like mass merchandisers and electronics stores, youd like to know the number of phone stores in the United States. Unfortunately, this figure is not available, either from the market-research houses or from the U.S. government. What do you do?8.One solution would be to go to your local library, pull out a few phone directories from around the country, turn to the Yellow Pages and start counting. You could then guesstimate how many stores per 100,000 people in each of the cities you counted. This, by the way, is exactly what a marketing consultant I know did for a large telecommunications client. 9.The question about phone stores was an example of what scientists call a Fermi problem, named after Nobel Prize-winning scientist Enrico Fermi, who used problems such as this to teach his students how to think for themselves. A Fermi problem does not contain all the information you need to solve it precisely. 10.Fermi is said to have once asked his university students how many piano tuners there were in Chicago. To answer the question, he recommended breaking it down into smaller, more manageable questions, and then having the courage to make some guesses and assumptions. How many people live in Chicago? Three million would be a reasonable estimate. How many people per family? Assume an average of four. How many families own pianos? Say one out of three. Then there were about 250,000 pianos in Chicago. How often would each be tuned? Maybe once every five years. That makes 50,000 tunings a year. How many pianos can one tuner tune in a day? Four? And how many in a year? Assuming 250 working days, one tuner can handle 1,000 pianos a year. 11.So theres work for approximately 50 piano tuners in Chicago which, as it turns out, is reasonably close to the actual number in the Yellow Pages.12.Why was guesswork so accurate? The law of averages is partly responsible. At any point, your assumptions may be too high or too low. But because of the law of averages, your mistakes will frequently balance out. 13.Heres another puzzle. You probably already know that black absorbs the most heat, while white reflects the most. But what about the other colors in between? How could you find the answer? Hint: its wintertime, but not too cold. 14.Ben Franklins solution was elegant. He simply laid broadcloth samples of various colors on the snow on a sunny morning. In a few hours, he reported, the black, being warmed most by the sun, was sunk so low as to be below the stroke of the suns rays; the dark blue, almost as low; the lighter blue not quite so much as the dark; the other colors, less as they were lighter, and the quite white remained on the surface of the snow, not having entered it at all.15.One of my favorite guesstimators is, west Connecticut inventor Stan Mason, who developed microwave cookware specially designed to position food in the best spot for cooking. 16.To do this, Mason needed to know where the microwaves hot spots were the place where the rays hit the food with the highest intensity. To find out, he put shelves of unpopped popcorn kernels in the microwave and watched to see which kernels popped first. He discovered a pattern in the ovens hottest rays: they werent in the corners or at the center, but in the shape of a mushroom cloud. 17.Then he designed cooking dishes to fit the pattern. He had come up with a resourceful way to approximate the answer rather than using scientifically sophisticated testing equipment.18.Fermi would have approved.19.By the way, the Mariana Trench is about six nautical miles deep, and a cannonball drops at a rate of ten feet per second. So it took the cannonball about an hour to reach the bottom of the trench. 20.Could this be guessed? If you know that Earths highest point Mount Qomolangma, is 29,000 feet, you might reasonably conclude that its lowest point would be close to the same distance. Then you might imagine that a heavy object would take one second to fall through the water of a 10-foot-deep swimming pool. These estimates would bring you close enough to the correct answer. Chinese Translation of Paragraphs1.几年前，我给应聘者面试，问他们“你有什么经验？”这个问题，后来逐渐问烦了。于是，我决定做一项单个问题的测试，从而了解这位新人是不是个善于解决问题的思考者。问题如下：2.您乘坐一艘游艇，横渡太平洋。驾驶员告诉您，游艇到了马里亚纳海沟最深的位置。此时，有个笨手笨脚的客人不小心把一个重达12磅的炮弹掉进海里。炮弹沉到海底要多久？3.在您往下读之前，请先来回答这个问题要特别注意解题方法。4.您是不是因为“信息不够”就完全瞎猜呢？您是不是过于拘泥于细节，而没能得到“绝对正确”的答案？或者说，您是不是先全神贯注在两个最重要的问题上马里亚纳海沟有多深？炮弹在水里下沉的速度有多快？然后才敢做出估计？5.大多数的面试者就是胡乱瞎猜，心想反正不可能百分之百地准确。很少有人愿意冒险做个估算。6.这与业务或创造性有什么关系吗？关系大着呢。在现实世界里，我们经常在没有充分信息时，需要做出决定。从吃什么到怎样养育孩子，有创意的人必须自己来思考。想要十拿九稳地做出决定，您也许既没有时间也没有金钱。做出最佳的猜测常常是您最佳的选择。7.譬如说，假设需要您为一种新的电话设备撰写一份销售计划，这个设备可以将您的姓名、公司、地址和电话号码发送到其他人的电话上，既可视频显示又能打印。除了像大众供货商和电子商店这些传统销售渠道，您得了解美国究竟有多少家“电话商店”。遗憾的是，无论从市场研究部门还是从美国政府的官方数据，都查不到这个数字。那您怎么办？8.有一个方法，那就是您到当地的图书馆去，取出全国各地的几本电话号码簿，翻到黄页，然后开始数数。那么，您可以猜出在数过的每个城市里，每十万人有几家电话商店。顺便说一句，我认识的一位营销顾问为一家大型长途通讯客户正是这么做的。9.这个关于电话商店的问题是科学家们称之为费米问题的例子。这是以诺贝尔奖获得者恩里科费米命名的，他用类似的问题教授学生独立思考的方法。费米问题并不包括您所需要准确解决问题的所有信息。10.据说，有一次费米问自己的大学生芝加哥有多少个钢琴调音师。要回答这个问题，他提议将问题分解成比较小的、比较容易处理的问题，然后鼓足勇气做些猜测和设想。芝加哥有多少居民？三百万是个合理的估计。每家有几口人？假设平均四个人。有多少人家有钢琴？比如说三家里有一家。那么，芝加哥大约有250,000架钢琴。每架钢琴多久调一次音？或许五年一次。那就一年调50,000次音。一个调音师一天可以调几架钢琴？四架？一年几架？假设有250个工作日，一个调音师一年可以调1,000架钢