剑桥雅思19Test2Passage3阅读原文翻译 An Inquiry into the existence of the gifted child 天才儿童
剑桥雅思19阅读第二套题目第三篇文章的主题为探究天才儿童。作者从唯一一位女性菲尔兹奖获得者玛丽亚姆·米尔札哈尼谈起，逐步拓展到塑造天才的各种因素，论证天才不是天生的，而是可以后天培养的，最终以爱因斯坦对自己的评价收尾。整篇文章有些抽象，还使用了比喻等修辞手法，读起来并不是很顺畅。下面是具体每一段的翻译。
剑桥雅思19Test2Passage3阅读原文翻译
第1段：
Let us start by looking at a modern ‘genius’, Maryam Mirzakhani, who died at the early age of 40. She was the only woman to win the Fields Medal-the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize. It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those ‘gifted’ children, those who have an extraordinary ability in a specific sphere of activity or knowledge. But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She went to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t her interest-reading was. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on. As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he’d learned. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her -and she was hooked.
让我们从一位当代“天才”说起——玛丽亚姆·米尔札哈尼（Maryam Mirzakhani）。她英年早逝，年仅40岁，却是迄今唯一获得菲尔兹奖（被誉为数学界的诺贝尔奖）的女性。人们很容易就会认为，像米尔札哈尼这样非凡的人，一定是那种所谓的“天才儿童”——在某一领域拥有异于常人的能力或知识。但如果深入了解她的故事，你会发现情况并非如此。米尔札哈尼出生于伊朗德黑兰，曾就读于一所非常有竞争力的女子中学。然而，她最初的兴趣并不在数学，而是阅读。她酷爱小说，只要是能找到的书都看。至于数学，在中学前两年她的成绩并不好。直到有一天，她哥哥给她讲了他在杂志上看到的一个著名数学问题，这一下激发了她的好奇心——她被这个问题迷住了，也就此对数学产生了兴趣。
第2段：
In adult life it is clear that she was curious, excited by what she did and also resolute in the face of setbacks. One of her comments sums it up. ‘Of course, the most rewarding part is the “Aha” moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new . . . But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.’That trail took her to the heights of original research into mathematics.
成年后的她显然是一个充满好奇心的人，对所做的事充满激情，同时也能在面对困难时保持坚定。她曾说过一句话，完美地总结了她的态度：“当然，最令人兴奋的时刻就是那种‘啊哈！’的瞬间，发现新东西、理解全新概念的喜悦……但对我来说，大部分时间做数学就像是走一段没有路标、也看不到尽头的漫长远足。”正是这样的旅程，将她带上了数学原创研究的高峰。
第3段：
Is her background unusual? Apparently not. Most Nobel prize winners were unexceptional in childhood. Einstein was slow to talk as a baby. This article is from Laokaoya website. He failed the general part of the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic – though they let him in because of high physics and maths scores. He struggled at work initially, but he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity.
她的背景是否不同寻常？其实并不是。大多数诺贝尔奖得主在童年时期都并不出众。比如爱因斯坦小时候说话很晚，甚至在报考苏黎世联邦理工学院时，文化课部分没有通过——虽然他在物理和数学方面的分数很高，学校最终还是录取了他。他刚开始工作时也颇为挣扎，但他一直坚持不懈，最终提出相对论，彻底改写了牛顿力学的定律。
第4段：
There has been a considerable amount of research on high performance over the last century that suggests it goes way beyond tested intelligence. On top of that, research is clear that brains are flexible, new neural pathways can be created, and IQ isn’t fixed. For example, just because you can read stories with hundreds of pages at the age of five doesn’t mean you will still be ahead of your contemporaries in your teens.
上世纪关于优异表现的研究已经表明：卓越远远不只是由智商决定的。研究还明确指出，大脑是有可塑性的，可以建立新的神经通路，智商也并不是一成不变的。比如，一个五岁就能读完几百页小说的孩子，并不意味着在十几岁时还能领先于同龄人。
第5段：
While the jury is out on giftedness being innate and other factors potentially making the difference, what is certain is that the behaviours associated with high levels of performance are replicable and most can be taught-even traits such as curiosity.
尽管人们对“天赋”是否天生这一问题尚无定论，其他因素是否起关键作用也仍在探讨中，但可以确定的是，与高水平表现相关的许多行为其实是可以复制的，大多数也都可以被教会——甚至像“好奇心”这样的特质，也能后天培养。
第6段：
According to my colleague Prof Deborah Eyre, with whom I’ve collaborated on the book Great Minds and How to Grow Them, the latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most individuals can reach levels of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented. However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers-curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example -an approach Eyre calls ‘high performance learning’. Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school.
根据我的同事黛博拉·艾尔教授（Prof Deborah Eyre）的观点——我们曾共同撰写《Great Minds and How to Grow Them》一书——最新的神经科学和心理学研究表明，大多数人都可以达到学校中通常被视为“天才与资优生”所拥有的表现水平。然而，前提是他们要学会正确的学习态度和方法，并培养出卓越表现者所具备的品质，比如好奇心、坚持不懈和勤奋努力。艾尔文章来自老烤鸭雅思称这种方法为“卓越表现学习”（High Performance Learning）。关键是，他们不仅需要在学校获得这方面的支持，在家庭中也必须得到正确的引导和帮助。
第7段：
Prof Anders Ericsson, an eminent education psychologist at Florida State University, US, is the co-author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. After research going back to 1980 into diverse achievements, from music to memory to sport, he doesn’t think unique and innate talents are at the heart of performance. Deliberate practice, that stretches you every step of the way, and around 10,000 hours of it, is what produces the goods. It’s not a magic number – the highest performers move on to doing a whole lot more, of course. Ericsson’s memory research is particularly interesting because random students, trained in memory techniques for the study, went on to outperform others thought to have innately superior memories-those who you might call gifted.
美国佛罗里达州立大学著名教育心理学家安德斯·艾利克森教授（Prof Anders Ericsson），是《高峰：新科学揭示的专家之道》（Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise）一书的联合作者。他自20世纪80年代起便开始研究各类成就，从音乐、记忆到体育等多个领域。他并不认为卓越表现的核心在于天生的才能。相反，是那种“有意的练习”（deliberate practice）——即每一步都具有挑战性的训练，再加上大约一万个小时的积累——才能真正造就卓越。当然，这并不是一个“神奇数字”，顶尖表现者往往会远远超出这个时间。艾利克森关于记忆的研究尤为有趣，因为在实验中，经过记忆技巧训练的一些普通学生，最终的表现超越了那些被认为拥有“天生超强记忆力”的人——也就是那些我们通常称作“天才”的人。
第8段：
But it is perhaps the work of Benjamin Bloom, another distinguished American educationist working in the 1980s, that gives the most pause for thought. Bloom’s team looked at a group of extraordinarily high achieving people in disciplines as varied as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, maths, sculpture and neurology. He found a pattern of parents encouraging and supporting their children, often in areas they enjoyed themselves. Bloom’s outstanding people had worked very hard and consistently at something they had become hooked on when at a young age, and their parents all emerged as having strong work ethics themselves.
不过，也许最值得深思的是本杰明·布卢姆（Benjamin Bloom）的研究成果。这位20世纪80年代活跃的杰出美国教育学家，其研究团队考察了一群在各自领域取得非凡成就的人士——他们所从事的领域包括芭蕾、游泳、钢琴、网球、数学、雕塑和神经学等。布卢姆发现了一种共同的模式：这些人的父母在他们成长过程中给予了大量的鼓励与支持（往往是在父母自己也感兴趣的领域里）。布卢姆的“卓越人物”们从小就对某个领域产生了浓厚兴趣，并在该领域持续不断地刻苦努力，他们的父母本身也普遍具有很强的敬业精神和勤奋态度。
第9段：
Eyre says we know how high performers learn. From that she has developed a high performing learning approach. She is working on this with a group of schools, both in Britain and abroad. Some spin-off research, which looked in detail at 24 of the 3,000 children being studied who were succeeding despite difficult circumstances, found something remarkable. Half were getting free school meals because of poverty, more than half were living with a single parent, and four in five were living in disadvantaged areas. Interviews uncovered strong evidence of an adult or adults in the child’s life who valued and supported education, either in the immediate or extended family or in the child’s wider community. Children talked about the need to work hard at school, to listen in class and keep trying.
艾尔教授表示，我们现在已经知道了卓越表现者是如何学习的。在此基础上，她发展出了一套“卓越表现学习”方法。目前她正与英国及海外的一些学校合作推广这一理念。相关的衍生研究也带来了令人瞩目的发现：在对3000名学生中24位成功应对逆境、取得佳绩的儿童进行深入研究时，发现他们有一个显著的共通点。尽管其中一半的孩子因贫困而享受免费校餐，超过一半来自单亲家庭，五分之四生活在贫困地区，但几乎每一个孩子身边都有一个或多个重视教育并给予支持的成年人，无论是父母、其他亲属还是社区成员。在访谈中，孩子们表达了清晰的认知：他们知道自己需要在学校努力学习，要专心听讲，不断坚持。
第10段：
Let us end with Einstein, the epitome of a genius. He clearly had curiosity, character and determination. He struggled against rejection in early life but was undeterred. Did he think he was a genius or even gifted? He once wrote: ‘It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. Most people say it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
让我们以爱因斯坦——天才的化身——作结。他无疑拥有强烈的好奇心、坚定的性格和顽强的毅力。尽管早年屡遭拒绝，但他从未气馁。那他是否认为自己是天才，或者哪怕是天赋异禀的人呢？他曾写道：“不是我有多聪明，只是我在问题上坚持得更久一些。大多数人认为，是智力造就了伟大的科学家。他们错了——是性格。”
