以下是我上7年级的儿子回答我在知乎上提出的问题。这篇文章其实是证明了小孩子学习英语比学中文，对他的成长更有帮助。我以自己三脚猫的英语功夫，改了他的原文中的一句话，今天放学回来我告诉他，被他笑话，又交给他按自己的想法改回去了。

英语学习，要从小开始。此言不谬！

Thousands of years ago, a region called today the Fertile Crescent, spanning from modern-day Iraq to Egypt, was home to the first domestication of wheat on Earth. The early farmers then spread to other close regions, such as eastward to Iran and then East Asia. Those migrating peoples usually became the dominant force when encountering indigenous hunter-gatherers and later rice farmers. For example some ancestors of modern Dravidian peoples were wheat farmers from Iran, originating in the Fertile Crescent. They spread to South India just prior to the formation of the Indian civilization, which grew rice instead of wheat, possibly because only a few knew how to grow wheat, and the rest only knew how to grow rice. Although there is no concrete evidence that those wheat farmers subdued the indigenous hunter-gatherers and rice farmers, we can, however, infer that they did, the different capabilities of wheat and rice shows us a logical explanation.

Wheat and rice are both cereal crops, but they are extraordinarily different from each other. Wheat has 20% consisting of micronutrients, most of which are completely absent in rice, those that rice does have at most only make up 17%, more importantly, wheat is 13% protein but rice is only 3% protein. Also, wheat provides 1,368 kilojoules, or 327 kilocalories, rice however, only yields 540 kilojoules, or 130 kilocalories. This means that with equal amounts of wheat and rice, more people can be sustained at the same time compared to rice. Also, present day statistics show that for every acre of land approximately 7 pounds of rice is harvested, while the amount of wheat harvested per acre is a staggering 2400 pounds. There are no concrete records of these statistics 100 years ago. Nor are there estimates of how different the comparison would be thousands of years ago. We can only assume that the massive difference we see now is relatively similar to then. Moreover, rice farmers in history often had to invest large amounts of time and cooperate to grow rice, whether voluntarily or being forced. Labor requirements for growing rice are simply too large compared to wheat. Meanwhile, still-primitive hunter-gatherers have the option to simply plant wheat at the right time, resume their usual life, and return during harvest season to reap the benefits. These three facts prove that wheat is a much more efficient food source than rice in almost every aspect.

With a storage room full of food, a band of farmers can sustain a far larger population, either through having offspring or through convincing outsiders to join with their stockpile. With more people, more wheat can be produced, and the cycle continues. When the population reaches a certain point, power and leaders would be necessary to keep the populace from leaving to pursue their own interests. Thus, centralization is developed. With such a large amount of people, only a portion of it would need to plant, take care of, and harvest the wheat crops. This leaves the rest of the people free to do other things, such as hunting, building, making ceramics, later writing, and so on. Now we see specialization of labour starting to emerge. At this point, it was entirely possible for this early tribe, and later on civilization to fight against rival tribes or weaker groups, take their resources, land and people, and put them to other uses how the victors saw fit. Here we see expansionism, plundering, and even slavery in effect. With people and land under powerful people in the group (aristocrats) additional food can be grown by the slaves, which later give the possibility of supporting many offspring as well as a private army, while still under the authority of a central authority (king). While the wheat farmers thrive and become more advanced, the rice farmers would still be clenched in preoccupation with food shortages, raids from rival bands or more advanced organizations and even nature itself.

As wheat is so much more efficient of a food supply compared to rice, this was probably the main reason why wheat-growing civilizations ended up more powerful than rice-growing ones. The Mesopotamian civilization (the earliest that cultivated wheat) arose in around 5000 BC, and the Indian civilization (the earliest that cultivated rice) in 2500–1700 BC, despite the fact that wheat and rice were first domesticated only approximately 400 years apart, around 9600 BC and 8000 BC, respectively.