发布时间： 2016年03月14日
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Fermi Problem
On a Monday morning in July, the world's first atom bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert. Forty seconds later, the shock waves reached the base camp where the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi and his team stood. After a mental calculation, Fermi announced to his team that the bomb's energy had equated 10, 000 tons of TNT. The bomb team was impressed, but not surprised. Fermi's genius was known throughout the scientific world. In 1938 he had won a Nobel Prize. Four years later he produced the first nuclear chain reaction(核链式反应), leading us into the nuclear age. Since Fermi's death in 1954, no physicist has been at once a master experimentalist and a leading theoretician.
Like all virtuosos (艺术品鉴赏家), Fermi had a distinctive style. He preferred the most direct route to an answer. He was very good at dividing difficult problems into small, manageable bits - talent we all can use in our daily lives.
To develop this talent in his students, Fermi would suggest a type of question now known as a Fermi problem. Upon first hearing one of these, you haven't the remotest notion of the answer, and you feel certain that too little information had been given to solve it. Yet when the problem is broken into sub-problems, each answerable without the help of experts or books, you can come close to the exact solution.
Suppose you want to determine Earth's circumference (圆周长) without looking it up. Everyone knows that New York and Los Angeles are about 3000 miles apart and that the time difference between them is three hours. Three hours if one-eighth of a day, and a day is the time it takes the planet to complete one rotation (公转), so its circumference must be eight times 3,000 or 24,000 miles. This answer differs from the true value, 24,902.45 miles, by less than four percent.
Ultimately the value of dealing with everyday problems the way Fermi did lies in the rewards of making independent discoveries and inventions. It doesn't matter whether the discovery is as important as determining the power of an atom or as small as measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles. Looking up the answer, or letting someone else find it, deprives you of the pleasure and pride that accompany creativity, and deprives you of an experience that builds up self-confidence. Thus, approaching personal dilemmas (困境) as Fermi problems can become a habit that enriches you life.
1、Fermi’s team was impressed by Fermi's announcement in the base camp because he could even work out the power of the atom bomb in his mind.
A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】 该题是细节方面的题。利用题干中的“Fermi's team，in the base camp，work out the power of the atom bomb”作为答案线索词，这样在第1段的第2，3，4句中找到答案相关句。
2、Fermi, an experimentalist as well as a theoretician, won a Nobel Prize for producing the first nuclear chain reaction in the world.
A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】 该题是细节方面的题。利用“the first nuclear chain reaction，Nobel Prize”这样的特征词作为答案线索词，这样在第1段中找到答案相关句：In 1938 he had won a Nobel Prize. Four years later he produced the first nuclear chain reaction…他在1938年就已获得诺贝尔奖。四年之后，他创造了第一次原子核的链反应，带领我们进入了原子时代。
3、Dividing a big problem into small problems is a talent Fermi had and a talent that has practical value in life.
A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】 该题是细节方面的题。利用“big problem，small problems，talent”作为答案线索词，这样在第2段找到答案相关句，判断问题句的说法正确。即：像所有的艺术家一样，费米有他自己的独特风格。他喜欢用最直接的路径去解决问题。他非常善于把困难问题分解成小的可以解决的小部分——这种能力我们在日常生活中都可以使用。
4、Fermi problem is to develop the talent of breaking a seemingly unanswerable problem into sub-problems and finding the solution to it, which is a typical Fermi problem.
A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】 该句是总结概括性的话语，推测可能需要进行推断。利用“Fermi problem，talent”作为答案线索词，这样在第2、3段找到答案相关句群，判断问题句的说法正确。
5、Then the fourth paragraph tells us how Fermi solved the problem of earth’s circumference without looking up.
A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】 第四段讲的是：假设你想不通过查阅而确定地球周长。每个人都知道纽约离洛杉矶大约3 000英里远，且两地的时区差为3小时。3小时是一天的1/8，一天刚好是地球完成一次公转的时间。所以它的周长肯定是3 000英里的八倍，即24 000英里。这个答案与真正的地球周长值24 902.45英里只相差不足4%。这只是在对该段的前句(有关Fermi problem的具体内容)进行举例说明， 而不是Fermi在解决这个问，题因此判断问题句的说法错误。
6、The last paragraph concludes the whole writing by stressing the value of important inventions and small discoveries.
A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】 最后一段的主题句为段首和段末句，这都与本题问的内容不一致。
7、Fermi was famous for inventing a device to calculate bomb’s energy accurately.
A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】 该题也是关于细节方面的问题，通常答案的位置应该在上一题答案位置的后面，但在最后一段中并没有发现问题所提到的内容，利用“device to calculate bomb's energy accurately”作为答案线索结构，发现文章中也并没有这样的词或其近义词，所以判断问题句为“没提到”。
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