2014届高考英语一轮复习话题阅读素材28

The Art of Smart Guessing Several days ago, interviewing job candidates, I grew tired of asking "What experience do you have?" I decided on a quiz to find out how resourceful a thinker the new hire might be. Here it is: 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? Before reading on, try to solve this yourself -- paying special attention to how you might solve it.

Did you make a completely wild guess because "there wasn't 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 two most important problems -- how deep is the Mariana Trench and how fast might a cannonball fall through the water? Most of my candidates simply made a wild guess. Rarely was someone willing to risk an approximation. What does this 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. A problem that doesn't contain all the information deeded to solve it is called a Fermi problem, named after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi once asked is students how many piano tuners there were in Chicago. To answer the question, he recommended breaking it down into smaller, more manageable questions. How many people live in Chicago? Three million would be a reasonable estimate. How many people per family? Assume an average of four.

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