By the time a child is six or seven...

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Hi Could you please explain the bold part to me?By the time a child is six or seven she has all the essential avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted with the care of a younger child.Thanks,Tom

Enoon · Accepted Answer

Mr. TomHi Could you please explain the bold part to me?By the time a child is six or seven she has all the essential avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted with the care of a younger child. Thanks,Tom

It looks like there is a word missing: she has learned all the essential avoidances well enough by heart .... That is not a great sentence, even with "learned". If she has learned something by heart, she has learned it completely, so "well enough" is nonsense, as I suspect the writer's message is also. Abstruse nonsense is always a bad sign, as is the idea that a six-year-old girl makes a good babysitter.

What an "essential avoidance" is, I do not know. I suppose the writer defines that elsewhere.

Mr. Tom · Answer

Thanks a lot, enoon!

Could you please look at this link where the passage has been given in SAT exam?

http://www.majortests.com/sat/reading-comprehension-test02

Tom

Enoon · Answer

Aha! I read that years ago. Mead (or the adapter) used "has" to mean "knows". My mistake. And OK, a six-year-old can watch a toddler in a place where she is surrounded by her tribe and the whole world is level sand with no venomous snakes or predators. But the sentence is still infelicitous. There is a bad spot further down, too: "The four or five little boys who all wish to assist at the important, business of helping a grown youth lasso reef eels, organize themselves into a highly efficient working team ...." Both those commas are wrong.

I guess avoidances are supposed to be things a person must avoid if she is to survive, in this case the campfire, the surf and falling coconuts.

Mr. Tom · Answer

Thanks again!

I need some light on the bold part. It is from the same essay.

Very small boys also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or nine years of age they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have not been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger children are worn off by their contact with older boys.

Tom

Enoon · Answer

Mr. TomThanks again!I need some light on the bold part. It is from the same essay.Very small boys also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or nine years of age they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have not been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger children are worn off by their contact with older boys.Tom

I wondered about that, too. I forget what she was driving at there. I'll bet that if you saw the whole chapter, it would be apparent what she meant. I suppose that by "rough edges" she meant those aspects of their character that make them hard to get along with.

The book is worth a read, by the way. It is a study of a human society in the closest thing to a state of nature you can get.

By the time a child is six or seven...

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