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  3. As more schools are set up today, learning is compulsory. It is an Ought, even worse, a Must, enforced by regular hours and rigi

As more schools are set up today, learning is compulsory. It is an Ought, even worse, a Must, enforced by regular hours and rigi

admin2012-12-01  28
问题     As more schools are set up today, learning is compulsory. It is an Ought, even worse, a Must, enforced by regular hours and rigid discipline. And the young sneer at the Oughts and resist the Musts with all their energy. The feeling often lasts through a lifetime. For too many of us, learning appears to be a surrender of our own will to external direction, a sort of enslavement.
    This is mistake. Learning is a natural pleasure, inborn and instinctive, one of the essential pleasures of the human race. Watch a small child, at an age too young to have had any mental habits implanted by training. Some delightful films made by the late Dr. Arnold Gesell of Yale University show little creatures who can barely talk investigating problems with all the zeal and excitement of explorers, making discoveries with the passion and absorption of dedicated scientists. At the end of each successful investigation, there comes over each tiny face an expression of pure heartfelt pleasure.
    But if the pleasure of learning is universal, why are there so many dull, incurious people in the world? It is because they were made dull, by bad teaching, by isolation, by surrender to routine, sometimes, too, by the pressure of hard work and poverty, or by the toxin of riches, with all their ephemeral and trivial delights. With luck, resolution and guidance, however, the human mind can survive not only poverty but even wealth.
    This pleasure is not confined to learning from textbooks, which are too often tedious. But it does include learning from books. Sometimes when I stand in a big library like the library of Congress, or Butler Library at Columbia, and gaze around me at the millions of books, I feel a sober, earnest delight hard to convey except a metaphor. These are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of hearing, and just as the touch of a button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart.
    But, far beyond books, learning means keeping the mind open and active to receive all kinds of experience. One of the best-informed men I ever knew was a cowboy who rarely read a newspaper and never a book, but who had ridden many thousands miles through one of the western states. He knew his state as thoroughly as a surgeon knows human body. He loved it. Not a mountain, not a canyon which had not much to tell him, not a change in the weather that could not interpret. And so, among the pleasures of learning, we should include travel, travel with an open mind, an alert eye and a visit to understand other people, other places, rather than looking in them a mirror image of oneself. If I were a young man today, I should have resolved to see — no, to learn — all the states before I was 35.
    Learning also means learning to practice, or at least to aspirate, an art. Every new art you learn appears like a new window on the universe; it is like acquiring a new sense. Because I was born and brought in Glasgow, Scotland, a hideous 19th-century industrial city, I did not understand the slightest thing about architecture until I was in my 20’s. Since then, I have learned a little about the art, and it has been a constant delight...As for reading books, this contains two different delights. One is the pleasure of apprehending the unexpected, such as when one meets a new author who has a new vision of the world. The other is of deepening one’s knowledge of a special field... Learning extends our lives (as Ptolemy said) into new dimensions. It is cumulative. Instead of diminishing in time, like health and strength, its returns go on increasing.
The main purpose of telling the story of the cowboy is
选项 A、to show that one doesn’t have to read books to acquire knowledge.
B、to show that one should travel a lot to learn about the world.
C、to show that nature can be a best textbook for us.
D、to show that one should learn to love his country by travel.
答案A
解析 推理判断题。由题干可将答案定位于倒数第二段。首句是该段主题句，所讲牛仔的例子很明显是为了证明该主题。由首句“除了读书，学习还意味着保持开放和积极的头脑从经历中汲取养分”可以推断答案为[A]。本段是讲述学习方式的，和认识世界无关，故排除[B]。从经历中汲取知识只是学习的一种途径，故[C]项属于推断过度。[D]项和文章主旨无关。
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