Lesson 36

A chance in a million

百万分之一的机遇

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1
  • Lesson 36
    • 2
  • A chance in a million
    • 3
  • What was the chance in a million?
    • 4
  • We are less credulous than we used to be.
    • 5
  • In the nineteenth century, a novelist would bring his story to a conclusion
    • 6
  • by presenting his readers with a series of coincidences--most of them wildly improbable.
    • 7
  • Readers happily accepted the fact that an obscure maidservant was really the hero's mother.
    • 8
  • A long-lost brother, who was presumed dead, was really alive all the time
    • 9
  • and wickedly plotting to bring about the hero's downfall. And so on.
    • 10
  • Modern readers would find such naive solutions totally unacceptable.
    • 11
  • Yet, in real life, circumstances do sometimes conspire to bring about coincidences
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  • which anyone but a nineteenth century novelist would find incredible.
    • 13
  • When I was a boy, my grandfather told me how a German taxi driver, Franz Bussman,
    • 14
  • found a brother who was thought to have been killed twenty years before.
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  • While on a walking tour with his wife, he stopped to talk to a workman.
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  • After they had gone on,
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  • Mrs. Bussman commented on the workman's close resemblance to her husband
    • 18
  • and even suggested that he might be his brother.
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  • Franz poured scorn on the idea,
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  • pointing out that his brother had been killed in action during the war.
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  • Though Mrs. Bussman was fully acquainted with this story,
    • 22
  • she thought that there was a chance in a million that she might be right.
    • 23
  • A few days later, she sent a boy to the workman to ask him if his name was Hans Bussman.
    • 24
  • Needless to say, the man's name was Hans Bussman and he really was Franz's long-lost brother.
    • 25
  • When the brothers were reunited,
    • 26
  • Hans explained how it was that he was still alive.
    • 27
  • After having been wounded towards the end of the war,
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  • he had been sent to hospital and was separated from his unit.
    • 29
  • The hospital had been bombed and Hans had made his way back into Western Germany on foot.
    • 30
  • Meanwhile, his unit was lost and all records of him had been destroyed.
    • 31
  • Hans returned to his family home,
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  • but the house had been bombed
    • 33
  • and no one in the neighbourhood knew what had become of the inhabitants.
    • 34
  • Assuming that his family had been killed during an air raid,
    • 35
  • Hans settled down in a village fifty miles away where he had remained ever since.