Literacy in My Life II

Today I took a math quiz about integral, which I think is quite easy. Math is easy for most Chinese students. It is because that we have learned a lot in China, but the most important reason I think is that in math we use letters, numbers and graphs more than sentences. So we can understand and solve the problems even if we do not know much English. Isn’t it amazing that we use the same mathematic symbols all over the world. I have never thought about that before, math is just like music, which can get rid of the gap between different languages. I am always interested in things can jump over the gap between different languages. I think the reason why music can do that is because that it does not tell a particular story, instead of which it tells an emotion. But as mathematics does not tell emotions, how can it ignore the gap between the languages? My answer is that it usually discusses problems in a made up model not the true world. Math models are extreme situations of the true world, so everything in it is exact and especial. Even though we live in different countries, we are in the same and the only mathematic country.