GED Reading : Flatland
I came across the strangest book the other day! It made me so confused, but it also really made me think. Here’s the beginning of it.
I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows — only hard and with luminous edges — and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas! a few years ago, I should have said, “my universe;” but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.
In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that there should be anything of what you call a “solid” kind; but I dare say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight the Triangles, Squares, and other figures moving about as I have described them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible, to us, except straight Lines; and the necessity of this I will speedily demonstrate.
Place a penny on the middle of one of your tables in Space; and leaning over it, look down upon it. It will appear a circle.
But now, drawing back to the edge of the table, gradually lower your eye (thus bringing yourself more and more into the condition of the inhabitants of Flatland), and you will find the penny becoming more and more oval to your view; and at last when you have placed your eye exactly on the edge of a table (so that you are, as it were, actually a Flatland citizen) the penny will then have ceased to appear oval at all, and will have become, so far as you can see, a straight line.
I never thought about that! If you lived in a place that was flat, like you were really small and lived between two sheets of paper, you would only see lines. And so if you think about it, we only see two dimentions at one time, even though our world has three dimentions (like height, width, and depth). We can sorta see in 3D because we can tell if something’s close or far away, but we can’t see someone from the front, and the back, and the top and bottom all at the same time! So could there be like a 4th dimention or a 5th dimention? Could someone in a 4th dimentional world see us from the top and bottom and even our insides all at once? See, it gets really confusing! I bet this is the kind of thing Dwayne would like. It sounds all like science fiction! But I guess it’s just math, really. Here’s a practice question about the book.
According to the above passage, who is the narrator in Flatland?
1. A Man
2. A Line
3. A 2D Shape
4. A 3D Shape
5. Impossible to Know
At first I might think that answer 1 is right, because it’s not like a shape could write a book. But you gotta remember that the narrator and the author are two different things, so even though only a man or a woman could write the book, the narrator could be a shape or an animal or anything!
If you re-read the passage, you notice a line right away that mostly explains this answer.
“Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about… and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.”
He says right there that his “countrymen” are “Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures” all living in a “flat” land. So it can’t be a man or a 3D shape.
That means it’s either 2, 3 or 5. Later on, he talks about how things look like a line, but are really a shape. Like how he says that when you look at a penny with your eye right on the table its on, it looks like a line. So you might think the narrator is a shape. However, in that first line I quoted, it said, “Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares…” Lines were included! So that means some of his “countrymen” might be lines, and so he might be a line too. It’s impossible to know from just this passage. So, the answer is number 5.
Pretty loco, huh? This is the kinda book where it’s not like the words themselves are hard or anything. There’s not really anything I have to look up in the dictionary. But his ideas that he’s talking about are kinda weird and I’m not used to thinking that way, so I have to read it a few times to get what he’s really saying. But in the end, it’s fun to read things like this once you understand them. Now I can understand the things like 2D and 3D and maybe even 4D a little better. So if someone starts talking about it, I don’t feel completely lost (and by SOMEONE it’s probably going to be Dwayne)!
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