托福写作高分范文：children’s numerical skills

　　新托福考试写作考生想拿高分，“肚子里必须有点墨水”，背上一篇两篇优秀范文，以备不时只需。以下这篇范文的题目是：children’s numericalskills。

　　People appear to born to compute. The numerical skills of children developso early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal clock ofmathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long after learning to walk andtalk, they can set the table with impress accuracy---one knife, one spoon, onefork, for each of the five chairs.

　　Soon they are capable of nothing that they have placed five knives, spoonsand forks on the table and, a bit later, that this amounts to fifteen pieces ofsilverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move on to subtraction. It seemsalmost reasonable to expect that if a child were secluded on a desert island atbirth and retrieved seven years later, he or she could enter a second enter asecond-grade mathematics class without any serious problems of intellectualadjustment.

　　Of course, the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of cognitivepsychologists has illuminated the subtle forms of daily learning on whichintellectual progress depends. Children were observed as they slowlygrasped-----or, as the case might be, bumped into----- concepts that adults takefor quantity is unchanged as water pours from a short glass into a tall thinone. Psychologists have since demonstrated that young children, asked to countthe pencils in a pile, readily report the number of blue or red pencils, butmust be coaxed into finding the total. Such studies have suggested that therudiments of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have alsosuggested that the very concept of abstract numbers------the idea of a oneness,a twoness, a threeness that applies to any class of objects and is aprerequisite for doing anything more mathematically demanding than setting atable-----is itself far from innate

　　我们并不主张考生死记范文，考试时如果遇到类似题目照搬上去，这并不能考察考生的写作能力。新托福考试写作多背一些范文，可以积累一些素材，像好的短语、词、句等，灵活运用。