sample essays of IELTS

19 childrens numerical skills

people appear to born to compute. The numerical skills of children
develop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an
internal clock of mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long
after learning to walk and talk, they can set the table with impress
accuracy---one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs.
Soon they are capable of nothing that they have placed five knives,
spoons and forks on the table and, a bit later, that this amounts to
fifteen pieces of silverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move
on to subtraction. It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a child
were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years
later, he or she could enter a second enter a second-grade mathematics
class without any serious problems of intellectual adjustment.

Of course, the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of
cognitive psychologists has illuminated the subtle forms of daily
learning on which intellectual progress depends. Children were observed
as they slowly grasped-----or, as the case might be, bumped into-----
concepts that adults take for quantity is unchanged as water pours from
a short glass into a tall thin one. Psychologists have since
demonstrated that young children, asked to count the pencils in a pile,
readily report the number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxed
into finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the rudiments
of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have also
suggested that the very concept of abstract numbers------the idea of a
oneness,
a twoness, a threeness that applies to any class of objects and is a
prerequisite for doing anything more mathematically demanding than
setting a table-----is itself far from innate