[00:01.040]--- lesson 36 A chance in a million
[00:06.400]--- Listen to the tape then answer the question below.
[00:12.040]--- What was the chance in a million?
[00:16.960]We are less credulous than we used to be.
[00:20.400]In the nineteenth century, a novelist would bring his story to a conclusion by presenting his readers with a series of coincidences -- most of them wildly improbable.
[00:33.000]Readers happily accepted the fact that an obscure maidservant was really the hero's mother.
[00:39.760]A long-lost brother, who was presumed dead, was really alive all the time and wickedly plotting to bring about the hero's downfall. And so on.
[00:49.920]Modern readers would find such naive solutions totally unacceptable.
[00:55.400]Yet, in real life, circumstances do sometimes conspire to bring about coincidences which anyone but a nineteenth century novelist would find incredible.
[01:07.240]When I was a boy, my grandfather told me how a German taxi driver,
[01:12.640]Franz Bussman, found a brother who was thought to have been killed twenty years before.
[01:18.800]While on a walking tour with his wife, he stopped to talk to a workman.
[01:23.960]After they had gone on, Mrs. Bussman commented on the workman's close resemblance to her husband and even suggested that he might be his brother.
[01:35.080]Franz poured scorn on the idea, pointing out that his brother had been killed in action during the war.
[01:43.880]Though Mrs. Busssman was fully acquainted with this story, she thought that there was a chance in a million that she might be right.
[01:53.040]A few days later, she sent a boy to the workman to ask him if his name was Hans Bussman.
[02:00.480]Needless to say, the man's name was Hans Bussman and he really was Franz's long-lost brother.
[02:08.680]When the brothers were reunited, Hans explained how it was that he was still alive.
[02:15.240]After having been wounded towards the end of the war, he had been sent to hospital and was separated from his unit.
[02:23.320]The hospital had been bombed and Hans had made his way back into Western Germany on foot.
[02:30.560]Meanwhile, his unit was lost and all records of him had been destroyed.
[02:36.640]Hans returned to his family home, but the house had been bombed and no one in the neighbourhood knew what had become of the inhabitants.
[02:46.000]Assuming that his family had been killed during an air raid, Hans settled down in a village fifty miles away where he had remained ever since.