I had been skiing since childhood. I had hardly fallen. I had never crashed into anything, and I’d skied mostly on the “blue” trails—the ones for intermediate (中级水平的) skiers. For this season, I decided to take a blue run, one I had done many times before. But whenever I reached the top, I started to slow down. Why did the blues look so...vertical (垂直的)? Were they always like this?
Simply having skied “many times before” didn’t mean I was getting better at it. Practice doesn’t always make perfect. Getting better or learning means doing different types of tasks instead of repeating the same mistake. With skiing, rather than just doing that same “blue” over and over again, we should go to different hills, trying different trails. The joy of getting better comes after the pain of getting worse.
One afternoon, I met a ski coach named Bob. When I told him my problem, he offered to watch me practise once, to see what I was doing wrong. Bob told me that the learning process isn’t always an up or forward improvement. When babies first learn to talk, they do it by copying adults. As they learn to talk about something in the past, they add an “-ed” to the end of a word. They might say something like, “We goed to the library today.” Though that’s not correct in grammar, the baby progressed from copying to using one of the rules of grammar. Adults do this, too.
Bob skied with me a bit more, until I had completed enough turns to make him feel like his volunteer-coach time wasn’t wasted.
“You’re skiing better already, young man!” he said.
“Thank you!”
Then I skied a few more feet and fell.
23. We can learn from Paragraph 1 that the writer might be ________ when he reached the top.
A.calm | B.confident | C.careless | D.afraid |
24. Bob talked of “babies learning to talk” to show that ________.
A.practice doesn’t always make perfect |
B.learning always takes time and trouble |
C.people make progress by making mistakes |
D.adults should sometimes learn from babies |
25. We can infer (推测) that the writer ________ from the last paragraph.
A.would try to go on skiing | B.had no chance of winning |
C.wanted to stop and gave up | D.might become a skiing coach |