Now, here is the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on the TIMMS questionnaire varies from country to country.

从问卷结果来看，国家间的差异很大，这是个有趣的现象。

It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries, according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire.

事实上，参加竞赛的各个国家的选手，其排名很可能是根据回答问卷题目的数量来决定的。

Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings. They are almost exactly the same.

现在，当你将问卷排名与数学竞赛的排名比较之后，你会得出怎样的结论？他们的结果几乎完全一致。

In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough

换句话说，如果来自某个国家的学生能够长久

and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

并专注地回答一份冗长的问卷上的每一个问题，那么通常这个国家的学生也具有解决数学问题的卓越能力。

The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled across it by accident.

发现该情况的是一名来自宾夕法尼亚大学的教育学者，俄林波，他偶然发现了这个事实。

"It came out of the blue," he says. Boe hasn't even been able to published his findings in a scientific journal, because, he says, it's just a bit too weird.

他说，这纯属意外发现。波甚至未曾在科学杂志上发表他的看法，这有一点奇怪，

Remember, he's not saying that the ability to finish the questionnaire and to excel on the math test is related.

因为他并没有说完成问卷的能力和赢得竞赛的能力有任何相关。

He's saying that they're the same: that if you compare the two rankings, they are identical.

他只说，它们是一样的；如果你将两个排名进行对比，结果会非常鲜明。

Think about this in another way. Imagine that every year, there was a math Olympic in some fabulous city in the world.

换种方式思考一下，如果每年世界上的知名城市全都举行一场奥林匹克数学竞赛，

And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders.

并且每个参赛的国家都派出一组由高中生和初中生组成的小队加入1000名参赛选手的阵营，

Boe's point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question.

那么不需要问任何一道数学难题，我们就可以精确地得知每个国家在奥林匹克数学竞赛中的排名。波指出我们只需要给他们布置同一项任务，

All you'd have to do is to give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn't even have to give them a task.

并衡量他们在任务中的付出程度，实际上，我们甚至都不用布置任务，

We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.

仅仅观察一下哪个国家的文化最注重工作态度，就可以预测哪个国家的数学能力最强。