大学英语精读第三册第二单元课文fruitful_questions翻译.doc

fruitful questions1 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. 2 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? 3 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?4 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.5 The middle one took this as a direct challenge. It could be the strawberry because its the only one you put on ice cream.6 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.7 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 that theyd all contracted a similar but milder disease, cow pox, which vaccinated them against the deadly smallpox.8 2They were refocusing the parameters. They were redefining the problems. They were reframing the questions. In short, they were doing what every scientist whos ever made an important discovery throughout history has done, according to Thomas Kuhn, in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: They were shifting old paradigms.9 But if this had been a workbook exercise in school, every kid who didnt circle tomato would have been marked wrong. Every kid who framed the question differently than Which is not a fruit? would have been wrong. Maybe that explains why so many of the worlds most brilliant scientists and inventors were failures in school, the most notable being Albert Einstein, who was perhaps this centurys most potent paradigm-shifter.10 4This is not meant to be a critique of schools. Lord knows, thats easy enough to do. This is, instead, a reminder that there are real limits to the value of information. I bring this up because we seem to be at a point in the evolution of our society where everyone is clamoring for more technology, for instant access to ever-growing bodies of information.11 Students must be on-line. Your home must be digitally connected to the World Wide Web. Businesses must be able to download volumes of data instantaneously. But unless we shift our paradigms and refocus our parameters, the super information highway will lead us nowhere.12 We are not now, nor have we recently been suffering from a lack of information. Think how much more information we have than Copernicus had four centuries ago. And he didnt do anything less Earth-shattering (pun intended) than completely change the way the universe was viewed. He didnt do it by uncovering more information - he did it by looking differently at information everyone else already had looked at. Edward Jenner didnt invent preventive medicine by accumulating information; he did it by reframing the question. 13 What we need as we begin to downshift onto the information highway is not more information but new ways of looking at it. We need to discover, as my kids did, that there is more