墨尔本PTE素材库——Gambling Gave Science Some Lucky Breaks

墨尔本PTE素材库——Gambling Gave Science Some Lucky Breaks

中文批注

这段音频的内容十分有趣，着重讲了概率论和博弈论的起源是来自于赌博哦～这段视频相对而言还是简单易懂的。相信对于大部分同学都没什么问题。大家可以把这篇素材看作一篇基础的练习~

澳大利亚语言学院会定期整理一些PTE的素材库，让各位PTE的考生，能够在平时练习的时候就能接触到一些和official questions criteria相近的话题素材，不但能够锻炼PTE考生的听力和复述的能力，也能在消化每篇素材的过程中提高自己的阅读能力以及词汇量。例如这篇关于概率论的起源，大家可以试着summarize这段视频的内容，如果不能完全记录下来文章内容地话，不妨看看Full Transcript来核对一下哦～

【Key vocabulary】

Statistics n. 统计学

Probability theory n. 概率论

Game theory n. 博弈论

Chaos theory n. 混沌理论

Renaissance n. 文艺复兴

Dies n．骰子

Full Transcript

The development of statistics, probability theory, game theory and chaos theory owes a lot to people trying to figure out various games of chance.  

“It’s not just gamblers using science. In many cases, science has benefited enormously from people studying the house.”

Mathematician Adam Kucharski. He’s the author of the new book The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling.

“Back in the Renaissance, actually, probability theory was developed to study these games. I mean, can you imagine having bets where it’s not actually clear what a fair game is?”

For example, in the 17th century the question came up, do you have the same chance of throwing a six by rolling one die four times or of throwing two sixes by rolling two dice 24 times?

“That had been around awhile, those kinds of bets and those kinds of questions, and that was Fermat and Pascal who developed a lot of this theory. And one of the crucial things was this concept of an expected value: if you play a game repeatedly what do you expect to win on average? And until you have that kind of theory in place it’s very hard to actually compare two bets directly and work out which one is more preferable.”

Pascal figured out that your chances of throwing one six in four rolls of a die was slightly more than 50 percent. But your odds of two sixes in 24 throws of two dice was slightly less than 50 percent.

“And a lot of this theory from probability to statistics and actually more recently things like game theory and chaos theory originated with studying games of chance, so I think science actually has benefitted a lot from people’s curiosity about gambling.”

My full interview with Adam Kucharski about his book The Perfect Bet is at our Web site as a Science Talk podcast.

(source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/gambling-gave-science-some-lucky-breaks/)