A Chance in a Million

更新：2023-11-22

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[00:01.47]Lesson 36
[00:03.92]A chance in a million
[00:12.45]What was the chance in a million?
[00:17.40]We are less credulous than we used to be.
[00:20.85]In the nineteenth century, a novelist would bring his story to a conclusion
[00:25.63]by presenting his readers with a series of coincidences --
[00:29.88]most of them wildly improbable.
[00:33.46]Readers happily accepted the fact
[00:35.87]that an obscure maidservant was really the hero's mother.
[00:40.05]A long-lost brother, who was presumed dead, was really alive all the time
[00:45.21]and wickedly plotting to bring about the hero's downfall. And so on.
[00:50.28]Modern readers would find such naive solutions totally unacceptable.
[00:55.60]Yet, in real life, circumstances do sometimes conspire to bring about coincidences
[01:02.43]which anyone but a nineteenth century novelist would find incredible.
[01:07.68]When I was a boy, my grandfather told me how a German taxi driver, Franz Bussman,
[01:14.19]found a brother who was thought to have been killed twenty years before.
[01:19.18]While on a walking tour with his wife, he stopped to talk to a workman.
[01:24.32]After they had gone on,
[01:25.97]Mrs. Bussman commented on the workman's close resemblance to her husband
[01:31.14]and even suggested that he might be his brother.
[01:35.46]Franz poured scorn on the idea,
[01:38.89]pointing out that his brother had been killed in action during the war.
[01:44.34]Though Mrs. Bussman was fully acquainted with this story,
[01:48.50]she thought that there was a chance in a million that she might be right.
[01:53.45]A few days later, she sent a boy to the workman to ask him
[01:57.80]if his name was Hans Bussman.
[02:00.91]Needless to say, the man's name was Hans Bussman
[02:05.38]and he really was Franz's long-lost brother.
[02:09.11]When the brothers were reunited,
[02:11.47]Hans explained how it was that he was still alive.
[02:15.59]After having been wounded towards the end of the war,
[02:19.24]he had been sent to hospital and was separated from his unit.
[02:23.72]The hospital had been bombed and Hans had made his way back into Western Germany on foot.
[02:30.98]Meanwhile, his unit was lost and all records of him had been destroyed.
[02:37.11]Hans returned to his family home, but the house had been bombed
[02:41.54]and no one in the neighbourhood knew what had become of the inhabitants.
[02:46.45]Assuming that his family had been killed during an air raid,
[02:50.62]Hans settled down in a village fifty miles away where he had remained ever since.