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.
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(xué)基礎(chǔ)是經(jīng)過(guò)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