unit8text1 the art of smart guessing1文档格式.docx

1、. Here it is.2. You are on a yacht sailing the Pacific Ocean. Your navigator announces you are over the deepest point, the Mariana Trench. Just then, a clumsy guest accidentally drops a 12-pound cannonball over the side. How long will it take for the cannonball to reach the bottom of the Ocean? Befo

2、re reading on, please try to solve this yourselfpaying special attention to how you might solve it? Did you make a completely wild guess because “there wasnt enough information”? did you get too bogged down in the details trying to come up with the” exactly right” answer？Or did you zero in on the to

3、w most important problemshow deep is the Mariana Trench and how fast might a cannonball fall through the water then hazard a guesstimate? Most of my candidates simply made a wild guess, thinking that they couldnt be 100-percent right4. Rarely was someone willing to risk an approximation. What does t

4、his have to do with business or creativity? a great deal. In the real world, we frequently need to make decisions when the full information does not exist. Form what foods we eat to how to raise our kids, creative people must think for themselves. There may not be the time or the money to make sure

5、of all your decisions. Your best guess will often be the best you can do. Suppose, for example, youve been asked to write a marketing plan for a new telephone device that will send your name, company, address and telephone number to a visual display or printer on another persons phone. in addition t

6、o conventional outlets like mass merchandisers and electronics stores, youd like to know the number of “phone stores” in the united states. Unfortunately, this figure is not available, either from the market-re-search houses or from the U.S. government. What do you do? One solution would be to go to

7、 your local library, pull out a few phone directories from around the country, turn to the yellow pages and start counting. You could then guesstimate how many stores per 100,000 people in each of the cities you counted. This, by the way, is exactly what a marketing consultant I know did for a large

8、 telecommunications client. The question about phone stores was an example of what scientist call a Fermi problem, names after noble prize-winning scientist enrico Fermi5, who uses problems such as this to teach his students how to think for themselves. a Fermi problem does not contain all the infor

9、mation you need to solve it precisely. Fermi is said to have once asked his university students how many piano tuners there were in Chicago , to answer the question, he recommended breaking it down into smaller, more manageable question, and then having the courage to make some guesses and assumptio

10、ns. How many people live in Chicago? Three million would be a reasonable estimate, how many people per family? Assume an average of four. How many families own pianos? Say one out of three. Then there were about 250,000 pianos in Chicago. How often would each be tuned? Maybe once every five years. T

11、hat makes 50,000 tunings a year. How many pianos can one tuner in a day? Four? And how many in a year? Assuming 250 working days, one tuner can handle1, 000 pianos a year. So theres work for approximately 50 piano tuners in Chicago which, as it turns out, is reasonably close to the actual number in

12、the yellow pages. Why was guesswork so accurate? The law of averages is partly responsible. At any point, your assumptions may be too high or too low. But because of the law of averages, your mistakes will frequently balance out. Heres another puzzle. You probably already know that black absorbs the

13、 most heat, while white reflects the most. But what about the other colors in between? How could you find the answer? Hint: its wintertime, but not too cold.14. Ben Franklin solution was elegant. He simply laid broadcloth samples of various colors on the snow on a sunny morning. “in a few hours,” he

14、 reported ,”the black, being warmed most by the sun, was sunk so low as to be below the stroke of the suns rays; the dark blue, almost as low; the lighter blue not quite so much as the dark; the other colors, less as they were lighter, and the quite white remained on the surface of the snow, not hav

15、ing entering it at all.” One of my favorite“ guesstimators” is Weston, Conn., inventor Stan mason6, who develop microwave cookware specially designed to position food in the best spot for cooking. To do this, mason needed to know where the microwaves “hot spots” werethe place where the rays hit the

16、food with the highest intensity. To find out, he put shelves of unpopped discovered a pattern in the ovens hottest rays: they werent in the corners or at the center, but in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Then he designed cooking dishes to fit the pattern. He had come up with a resourceful way to app

17、roximate the answer rather than using scientifically sophisticated testing equipment. Fermi would have approved7. By the way, the Mariana trench is about six nautical miles deep, and a cannonball drops at a rate of ten feet per second. So it took the cannonball about an hour to reach the bottom of t

18、he trench. Could this be guessed? If you know that earths highest point mount qomolangma, is 29,000 feet, you might reasonably conclude that its lowest point would be close to the same distance. Then you might imagine that a heavy object would take one second to fall through the water of a 10-foot-d

19、eep swimming pool. These estimates would bring you close enough to the correct answer. GLOSSARYResourceful clientHire tunerNavigator tuneAccidentally guessworkCannonball balance outBog down broadclothZero in strokeHazard cookwareGuesstimate unpoppedApproximation popcornVisual kernelConventional popO

20、utlet approximateMass merchandiser sophisticatedTelecommunications nauticalNotes1. About the author Bryan w. Mattimore, president of the Mattimore group consulting company in Stamford, Connecticut, majors in applied business creativity, and has designed and facilitated ideation program for such orga

21、nizations as Pepsi co , Haagen-Dazs, AT&T, Helene Curtis, and the U.S. Government. A cun laude graduate of Dartmouth, he writes the annual” breakthrough ides” cover story for success magazine. He is author of 99% inspiration; tips, tales& techniques for liberating your business creativity （1993）, fr

22、om which the current text is taken.2. To find out how resourceful a thinker the new hire might be to find out whether the prospective employee would be good at finding ways of dealing with problems, and how good he or she might be.3. The Mariana trench a depression in the floor of the Pacific Ocean,

23、 the deepest seafloor depression in the world. It is located just east of the Mariana islands in the western ort of the ocean basin, which embraces the deepest point on earth; the challenger deep, which is estimated to be 11,033m （36,198ft） deep.4.thinking that if they couldnt be 100-percent right（p

24、aragragh5） considering that they couldnt be completely right anyway.5. Fermi, enrico（19011954）,Italian-born American physicist and nobel prize winner, who made important contribution to both theoretical and experimental physics. Fermis best-know contribution was the demonstration of the first contro

25、lled atomic fission reaction. He won the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in bombarding atoms with neutrons, subatomic particles with no electric charge.6 .Stan mason （paragragh15） born in 1921in Trenton, New Jersey, mason created his first invention at the age of 7; a clothespin fishing lur

26、e that he sold to his friends, mason calls himself” an inventor of ordinary, everyday productnot high-tech, but common, useful things.” in the last 50 years, his over 100inventions and 55 patents include the squeezable ketchup bottle, granola bars , heated pizza boxes, heatproof plastic microwave co

27、okware, stringless band-aid packaging , dental floss dispensers, and” instant” splints and casts for broken limbs.7.fermi would have approved（paragraph18） if Fermi had known what mason was doing, he would have applauded it.Text comprehension.decide which of the following best states the authors purp

28、oseA. To introduce n effective method of interviewing candidates.B. To decide on a new quiz to find out how resourceful a thinker might be.C. To provide n access to gaining necessary information.D. To recommend a creative model of thinking in decision making.judge, according to the text, whether the

29、 following statements re true or false1. The author asked the readers to pay close attention to the method to be used in solving the quiz question.2. The best way to know the number of “phone stores “ in the united states is to go to the local library to do statistical research.3. To illustrate the

30、smart guessing approach, the author has cited all together seven examples.4. The law of averages is partly responsible for the accuracy of our guesswork because our assumptions at the two extremes usually balance out. answer the following question.1. Why did the author decide on a one-question quiz in the interview?2. What does the author suggest as the best solution to the quiz question?3. What does the solution to such quiz questions mean to business or creativity?4. What do scientists call such questi