Common Science
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- General learners who want to practice reading with English popular-science material
- Non-specialist readers interested in basic scientific common sense
- Readers studying early popular-science writing style and science education
- People who need light English reading to fill fragmented time
Not a good fit for
- Specialist readers seeking cutting-edge scientific developments
- Exam-preparation students who need systematic textbooks with exercises
- Beginners with weak English who rely on Chinese explanations
Reading tips
- Pick topics by table of contents, read chapters of interest first, then return to related chapters to fill in concepts.
- After each chapter, retell the core concepts in your own words to check whether you truly understand them.
- When you encounter statements that conflict with contemporary knowledge, mark them for separate verification and maintain critical reading.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
FAQ
Is this book suitable for learning English?
Is the scientific content in the book still valid today?
Do I need to read it from beginning to end in order?
Comments
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About the author
Carleton Washburne (1889–1968) was an American educator best known for promoting the Winnetka Plan and progressive education. He paid close attention to individual differences among children in learning and argued that curricula and teaching should adapt to children's developmental pace rather than requiring all children to follow a uniform schedule passively; the Winnetka Plan was a practical expression of this idea. Beyond educational experiments and school reform, he also wrote about science for general readers. The work held in this collection, Common Science, belongs to this category, explaining basic scientific knowledge to ordinary readers in clear, accessible language. Overall, his writing reflects a distinctly educator's perspective, valuing comprehensibility and practical use. Public information on the details of his life is limited, so this introduction focuses only on his educational ideas and the orientation of his works.
