共用题干
Even Intelligent People Can Fail

1 The striking thing about the innovators who succeeded in making our modern world is
how often they failed.Turn on a light,take a photograph,watch TV,search the Web,jet
across the Pacific Ocean, talk on a celiphone（手机）.The innovators who left us these
things had to find the way to success through a maze（错综复杂）of wrong turns.
2 We have just celebrated the 125th anniversary of American innovator Thomas Edison's
success in heating a thin line to white-hot heat for 14 hours in his lab in New Jersey,U.S.
He did that on October 22,1879,and followed up a month later by keeping a thread of
common cardboard alight（点亮着的）in an airless space for 45 hours.Three years later
he went on to light up half a square mile of downtown Manhattan,even though only one of
the six power plants in his design worked when he turned it on,on September 4,1882.
3 "Many of life's failures,"the supreme innovator said,"are people who did not realize
how close they were to success when they gave up."Before that magical moment in
October 1879,Edison had worked out no fewer than 3,000 theories about electric light,but
in only two cases did his experiments work.
4 No one likes failure,but the smart innovators learn from it.Mark Gumz,the head of
the camera maker Olympus America Inc,attributes some of the company's successes in
technology to understanding failure.His popular phrase is:"You only fail when you quit."
5 Over two centuries,the most common quality of the innovators has been persistence.
That is another way of saying they had the emotional ability to keep up what they were
doing.Walt Disney,the founder of Disneyland,was so broke after a succession of
financial failures that he was left shoeless in his office because he could not afford the U.S.
$1.50 to get his shoes from the repair shop.Pioneering car maker Henry Ford failed with
one company and was forced out of another before he developed the Model T car.
6 Failure is harder to bear in today's open,accelerated world.Hardly any innovation works the
first time.But an impatient society and the media want instant success.When American music
and movie master David Geffen had a difficult time,a critic said nastily that the only difference
between Geffen Records(Geffen's company)and the Titanic(the ship that went down)was
that the Titanic had better music.Actually,it wasn't.After four years of losses,Geffen had so
many hits（成功的作品）he could afford a ship as big as the Titanic all to himself.

Paragraph 2________
A:Importance of learning from failure
B:Quality shared by most innovators
C:Edison's innovation
D:Edison's comment on failure
E:Contributions made by innovators
F:Miseries endured by innovators