People appear to be born to compute. The numerical skill 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 impressive accuracy——one plate, one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they are capable of noting that they have placed five knives, spoons, and forks on the table and, a hit 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-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 granted, as they refused, for instance, to concede that quantity is unchanged as water pours from a short stout 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.
What does the passage mainly discuss?
(A) Trends in teaching mathematics to children
(B) The use of mathematics in child psychology
(C) The development of mathematical ability in children
(D) The fundamental concepts of mathematics that children must learn
It can be inferred from the passage that children normally learn simple counting
(A) soon after they learn to talk
(B) by looking at the clock
(C) when they begin to be mathematically mature
(D) after they reach second grade in school
The word "illuminated in line 11 is closest in meaning to
(A) illustrated
(B) accepted
(C) clarified
(D) lighted
