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(核鏈式反應), 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(藝術(shù)品鑒賞家), 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(圓周長) 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(公轉(zhuǎn)), so its circumference must be eight times 3000 or 24000 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.

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. The last paragraph concludes the whole writing by stressing the value of important inventions and small discoveries.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

22. Fermi was famous for inventing a device to calculate bomb's energy accurately.

A. Right B. Wrong C. Not mentioned

16——22 A B A A B B C

報考選擇：職稱英語報考科目|級別選擇|報名條件及相關(guān)問題解答

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