1.Why couldn't the average man explain how a telephone works? Because he ...
2.According to the passage, what is the great pleasure as ignorance? It is the pleasure of ...
3.Why was Socrates famous for wisdom? Because he realized his ... at the age of seventy.
The average man who uses a telephone could not explain how a telephone
works. He takes for granted the telephone, the railway train, the linotype,
the airplane, as our grandfathers took for granted the miracles of the
gospels. He neither question nor understand them. It is as though each of
us investigated and made his own a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside
the day's work is regarded by most men as a gewgaw. Still we are constantly
in reaction against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and
speculate. We revel in speculations about anything at all --- about life
after death or about such questions as that which is said to have puzzled
Aristotle, "Why sneezing from noon to midnight was good, but from night to
noon unlucky?" One of the greatest joys known to man is to take such a
flight into ignorance in search of the knowledge. The great pleasure of
ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions. The man who has
lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure of dogma, which is the
pleasure of answering, is already beginning to stiffen. One envies so
inquisitive a man as Jewell, who sat down to the study of physiology in his
sixties. Most of us have lost the sense of our ignorance long before that
age. We even become vain of our squirrel's hoard of knowledge and regard
increasing age itself as a school of omniscience. We forget that Socrates
was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized
at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.
