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--- lesson 36 A chance in a million |
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--- Listen to the tape then answer the question below. |
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--- What was the chance in a million? |
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We are less credulous than we used to be. |
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In the nineteenth century, a novelist would bring his story to a conclusion by presenting his readers with a series of coincidences -- most of them wildly improbable. |
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Readers happily accepted the fact that an obscure maidservant was really the hero's mother. |
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A long-lost brother, who was presumed dead, was really alive all the time and wickedly plotting to bring about the hero's downfall. And so on. |
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Modern readers would find such naive solutions totally unacceptable. |
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Yet, in real life, circumstances do sometimes conspire to bring about coincidences which anyone but a nineteenth century novelist would find incredible. |
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When I was a boy, my grandfather told me how a German taxi driver, |
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Franz Bussman, 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, Mrs. Bussman commented on the workman's close resemblance to her husband and even suggested that he might be his brother. |
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Franz poured scorn on the idea, pointing out that his brother had been killed in action during the war. |
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Though Mrs. Busssman was fully acquainted with this story, she thought that there was a chance in a million that she might be right. |
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A few days later, she sent a boy to the workman to ask him if his name was Hans Bussman. |
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Needless to say, the man's name was Hans Bussman and he really was Franz's long-lost brother. |
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When the brothers were reunited, Hans explained how it was that he was still alive. |
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After having been wounded towards the end of the war, he had been sent to hospital and was separated from his unit. |
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The hospital had been bombed and Hans had made his way back into Western Germany on foot. |
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Meanwhile, his unit was lost and all records of him had been destroyed. |
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Hans returned to his family home, but the house had been bombed and no one in the neighbourhood knew what had become of the inhabitants. |
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Assuming that his family had been killed during an air raid, Hans settled down in a village fifty miles away where he had remained ever since. |
