Question

Most of us fear failure. However, without failure, progress would be impossible. In fact, the word success comes from the Latin succedere, meaning “to come after.” And what does success usually come after? Failure. It seems that one cannot exist without the other.

Every failure – even the worst ones – helps us learn to do things differently in the future. “Learning from the past mistakes and making changes helped me to reach the top of Everest successfully,” says mountaineer Pete Athans, who has now reached the world’s highest peak (山峰) seven times. Failure also reminds us that things can go wrong – sometimes with terrible results.

Austrian Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner is the first woman to reach the top of all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks without extra oxygen (氧氣). In 2007, while climbing in Nepal, she was in an avalanche ( 雪 崩 ). She survived, but two nearby Spanish climbers died. The experience taught Kaltenbrunner that no matter how prepared a person is, bad things can still happen. But Kaltenbrunner decided she had to learn from her experience and move on.

Accepting failure is not easy for many, though. We are often reluctant to tell people that we are failures because our good name depends on success. However, things are slowly changing. In the past ten years, some scientific magazines – mostly in medicine – have published reports of failed experiments. The belief is that the science community can also learn from “negative” results and that this can finally lead to positive outcomes.

The business world already understands the value of negative results. Eli Lilly and Company has failure parties to study data about medicine that doesn’t work. In fact, one of the business world’s most famous failures became one of its biggest successes. In the early 1990s, Apple Corporation created the Apple Newton. It was one of Apple’s biggest failures. However, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, believed the product had potential (潛力) and he began to improve it. In time, this led to the creation of the iPhone and the iPad, two of the company’s most successful products.

The story of the Apple Newton can teach us another important lesson about failure. There is a lot we can learn by studying mistakes. Perhaps the most important lesson is that failure and success are two sides of the same coin. One truly cannot exist without the other.

1.The writer writes Paragraph 2 and 3 mainly to .

A.show how bad things can become important lessons

B.tell us that it’s possible for anyone to be successful

C.prove how bad things can happen in any situation

D.teach us what not to do when climbing mountains

2.The underlined word “reluctant” in Paragraph 4 probably means “ ”.

A.unable B.unsure C.unwilling D.uninterested

3.What is the passage mainly about?

A.An attitude towards failure.

B.The experience of success.

C.A difficult way to success.

D.The rewards of failure.

Answer 1