21世纪大学英语读写教程第四册 Unit3-21世纪大学英语读写教程

Unit 3

Text A

Pre-reading Activities

First Listening
Before Listening to the tape, have a quick look at the following words.

smallpox
天花

stuck
被难住了

cowpox
牛痘

lateral thinking
横向思维

vertical
纵向的；垂直的

Second Listening
Listen to the tape again and then choose tne best answer to each of the following questions.

1. How did Dr. Jenner solve the problem of smallpox?
A) By studying many, many sick people.
B) By studying people who didn't get sick.
C) By studying lateral thinking.
D) With help from Dr. de Bono.
2. The key to lateral thinking is _________.
A) never giving up
B) getting help from others
C) moving sideways
D) changing you point of view
3. The saying, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" expresses ________.
A) the aggressive attitude of vertical thinking
B) traditionally western lateral thinking
C) a way to change your point of view
D) how Edward de Bono likes to solve problems
4. The main purpose of this passage is ________.
A) to discuss a major medical breakthrough
B) to introduce a new concept of problem solving
C) to talk about the life of Edward de Bono
D) to contrast Eastern and Western ways of thinking

How to Change Your Point of View

Caroline Seebohm

Dr. Edward Jenner was busy trying to solve the problem of smallpox. After studying case after case, he still found no possible cure. He had reached an impasse in his thinking. At this point, he changed his tactics. Instead of focusing on people who had smallpox, he switched his attention to people who did not have smallpox. It turned out that dairymaids apparently never got the disease. From the discovery that harmless cowpox gave protection against deadly smallpox came vaccination and the end of smallpox as a scourge in the western world.
We often reach an impasse in our thinking. We are looking at a problem and trying to solve it and it seems there is a dead end. It is on these occasions that we become tense, we feel pressured, overwhelmed, in a state of stress. We struggle vainly, fighting to solve the problem.
Dr. Jenner, however, did something about this situation. He stopped fighting the problem and simply changed his point of view—from his patients to dairy maids. Picture the process going something like this: Suppose the brain is a computer. This computer has absorbed into its memory bank all your history, your experiences, your training, your information received through life; and it is programmed according to all this data. To change your point of view, you must reprogramme your computer, thus freeing yourself to take in new ideas and develop new ways of looking at things. Dr. Jenner, in effect, by reprogramming his computer, erased the old way of looking at his smallpox problem and was free to receive new alternatives.
That's all very well, you may say, but how do we actually do that?
Doctor and philosopher Edward de Bono has come up with a technique for changing our point of view, and he calls it Lateral Thinking.
The normal Western approach to a problem is to fight it. The saying, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going," is typical of this aggressive attitude toward problem-solving. No matter what the problem is, or the techniques available for solving it, the framework produced by our Western way of thinking is fight. Dr. de Bono calls this vertical thinking; the traditional, sequential, Aristotelian thinking of logic, moving firmly from one step to the next, like toy blocks being built one on top of the other. The flaw is, of course, that if at any point one of the steps is not reached, or one of the toy blocks is incorrectly placed, then the whole structure collapses. Impasse is reached, and frustration, tension, feelings of fight take over.