[al:新概念英语（三）] [ar:MP3 同步字幕版（英音）] [ti:A Chance in a Million] [by:更多学习内容，请到chazidian.com搜索“新概念”] [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.