Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick II in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.
    All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
    Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.
    Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about l,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.
    Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern ‘toy-bear’. And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.
    But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child’s babbling (咿哑学语), grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

    In general, our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucratic（官僚主义的） management in which man becomes a small well-oiled cog in the machinery. The oiling is done with higher wages, well-ventilated factories and piped music, and by psychologists and “human-relations” experts; yet all this oiling does not alter the fact that man has become powerless, that he does not wholeheartedly participate in his work and that he is bored with it. In fact, the blue-collar and the white-collar workers have become economic puppets who dance to the tune of automated machines and bureaucratic management.
    The worker and employee are anxious, not only because they might find themselves out of a job; they are anxious also because they are unable to acquire any real satisfaction or interest in life. They live and die without ever having confronted the fundamental realities of human existence as emotionally and intellectually independent and productive human beings.
    Those higher up on the social ladder are no less anxious. Their lives are no less empty than those of their subordinates. They are even more insecure in some respects. They are in a highly competitive race. To be promoted or to fall behind is not a matter of salary but even more a matter of self-respect. When they apply for their first job, they are tested for intelligence as well as for the right mixture of submissiveness and independence. From that moment on they are tested again and again by the psychologists, for whom testing is a big business, and by their superiors, who judge their behavior, sociability, capacity to get along, etc. This constant need to prove that one is as good as or better than one’s fellow-competitor creates constant anxiety and stress, the very causes of unhappiness and illness.
    Am I suggesting that we should return to the preindustrial mode of production or to nineteenth-century “free enterprise” capitalism? Certainly not. Problems are never solved by returning to a stage which one has already outgrown. I suggest transforming our social system from a bureaucratically managed industrialism in which maximal production and consumption are ends in themselves into a humanist industrialism in which man and full development of his potentialities—those of love and of reason—are the aims of all social arrangements. Production and consumption should serve only as means to this end, and should be prevented from ruling man.

    When an invention is made, the inventor has three possible courses of action open to him: he can give the invention to the world by publishing it , keep the idea secret, or patent it.
    A granted patent is the result of a bargain struck between an inventor and the state, by which the inventor gets a limited period of monoply（垄断）and publishes full details of his invention to the public after that period terminates.
    Only in the most exceptional circumstances is the lifespan of a patent extended to alter this normal process of events.
    The longest extension ever granted was to Georges Valensi; his 1939 patent for colour TV receiver circuitry was extended until 1971 because for most of the patent’s normal life there was no colour TV to receive and thus no hope of reward for the invention.
    Because a patent remains permanently public after it has terminated, the shelves of the library attached to the patent office contain details of literally millions of ideas that are free for anyone to use and, if older than half a century, sometimes even repatent. Indeed, patent experts often advise anyone wishing to avoid the high cost of conducting a search through live patents that the one sure way of avoiding violation of any other inventor’s right is to plagiarize a dead patent. Likewise, because publication of an idea in any other form permanently invalidates further patents on that idea, it is traditionally safe to take ideas from other areas of print. Much modern technological advance is based on these presumptions of legal security.
    Anyone closely involved in patents and inventions soon learns that most ‘new’ ideas are, in fact, as old as the hills. It is their reduction to commercial practice, either through necessity or dedication, or through the availability of new technology, that makes news and money. The basic patent for the theory of magnetic recording dates back to 1886. Many of the original ideas behind television originate from the late 19th and early 20th century. Even the Volkswagen rear engine car was anticipated by a 1904 patent for a cart with the horse at the rear.

    Although interior design has existed since the beginning of architecture, its development into a specialized field is really quite recent. Interior designers have become important partly because of the many functions that might be (1) ______in a single large building.
    The importance of interior design becomes (2) ______when we realize how much time we (3) ______ surrounded by four walls. Whenever we need to be indoors, we want our surroundings to be (4) ______attractive and comfortable as possible. We also expect (5) ______place to be appropriate to its use. You would be (6) ______if the inside of your bedroom were suddenly changed to look (7) ______the inside of a restaurant. And you wouldn’t feel (8) ______in a business office that has the appearance of a school.
    It soon becomes clear that the interior designer’s most important basic (9) ______is the function of the particular (10) ______. For example, a theater with poor sight lines, poor sound-shaping qualities, and (11) ______few entries and exits will not work for (12) ______ purpose, no matter how beautifully it might be (13) ______.Nevertheless, for any kind of space, the designer has to make many of the same kind of (14) ______.He or she must coordinate the shapes, lighting and decoration of everything from ceiling to floor. (15)______addition, the designer must usually select furniture or design built-in furniture, according to the functions that need to be served.

    (1) The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind; it is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about and given precise and exact explanations. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and methods of a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graded weights. (2)It is not that the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but that the latter is a much finer apparatus and of course much more accurate in its measurement than the former.
    You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some familiar examples. (3)You have all heard it repeated that men of science work by means of induction (归纳法) and deduction, that by the help of these operations, they, in a sort of sense, manage to extract from Nature certain natural laws, and that out of these, by some special skill of their own, they build up their theories. (4) And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can be by no means compared with these processes, and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special training. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men; but if you will not be frightened by terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong, and that all these terrible apparatus are being used by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives.
    There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere’s plays; where the author makes the hero express unbounded delight on being told that he had been talking prose (散文) during the whole of his life. In the same way, I trust that you will take comfort, and be delighted with yourselves, on the discovery that you have been acting on the principles of inductive and deductive philosophy during the same period. (5) Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.