The numerical skills of children develop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal clock of mathematical maturity guiding their growth.
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 thus mastered addition, they move on to subtraction.
如此這般地掌握了加法之后,他們又轉向減法。
It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a child were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years later,
有一種設想幾乎順理成章,那就是,即使一個孩子一出生就被隔絕到荒島上,七年后返回世間,
he or she could enter a second enter a second-grade mathematics class without any serious problems of intellectual adjustment.
也能直接上小學二年級的數(shù)學課,而不會碰到任何智力調整方面的大麻煩。
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.
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 into finding the total.
Such studies have suggested that the rudiments of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort.
此類研究表明:數(shù)學基礎是經(jīng)過逐漸努力后掌握的。
They have also suggested that the very concept of abstract numbers
他們還表示抽象的數(shù)字概念,
------the idea of a oneness, a twoness, a threeness that applies to any class of objects and is a prerequisite for doing anything more mathematically demanding than setting a table