TEXT C

Years of watching and comparing bright children and those not bright, or less bright, have shown that they are very different kinds of people. The bright child is curious about life and reality, eager to get in touch with it, embrace it, unite himself with it. There is no wall, no barrier between him and life. The dull child is far less curious, far less interested in what goes on and what is real, more inclined to live in worlds of fantasy. The bright child likes to experiment, to try things out. He lives by the maxim that there is more than one way to skin a cat. If he can‟t do something one way, he‟ll try another. The dull child is usually afraid to try at all. It takes a good deal of urging to get him to try even once; if that try fails he is through.

The bright child is patient. He can tolerate uncertainty and failure, and will keep trying until he gets an answer. When all his experiments fail, he can even admit to himself and others that for the time being he is not going to get an answer. This may annoy him, but he can wait. Very often, he does not want to be told how to do the problem or solve the puzzle he has struggled with, because he does not want to be cheated out of the chance to figure it out for himself in the future. Not so the dull child. He cannot stand uncertainty or failure. To him, an unanswered question is not a challenge or an opportunity, but a threat. If he can‟t find the answer quickly, it must be given to him, and quickly; and he must have answers for everything. Such are the children of whom a second grade teacher once said, “but my children like to have questions for which there is only one answer.” They did; and by a mysterious coincidence, so did she.

The bright child is willing to go ahead on the basis of incomplete understanding and information. He will take risks,sail uncharted seas, explore when the landscape is dim, the land marks few, the light poor. To give only one example, he will often read books he does not understand in the hope that after a while enough understanding will emerge to make it worthwhile to go on. In this spirit some of my fifth graders tried to read Moby Dick. But the dull child will go ahead only when he thinks he knows exactly where he stands and exactly what is ahead of him. If he does not feel he knows exactly what an experience will be like, and if it will not be exactly like other experience he already knows, he wants no part of it. For while the bright child feels that the universe is on the whole a sensible, reasonable, and trustworthy place,the dull child feels that it is senseless, unpredictable, and treacherous. He feels that he can never tell what may happen,particularly in a new situation, except that it will probably be bad.

If the dull child fails in the first attempt, he will ________.

What does the rod “maxim” in the first paragraph most probably mean?

Why does the bright child refuse to get help from others even when he fails?

According to the author, the reason why some fifth grade students want to read “Moby Dick” is probably that ________.

It is implied but not stated in the text that ________.