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Read the following passage and choose the most likely answer to each of the following questions.

    Failure: We all avoid it, and most of us fear it. However, without failure, progress would be impossible. Indeed, the word success comes from the Latin succedere, meaning "to come after." And what does success usually come after? Failure. It seems that one cannot exist without the other.

    Every failure—even the worst ones—helps us learn to do things differently in the future. "I learned how not to climb the first four times tried to summit Everest," says mountaineer Pete Athans, who has now reached the world's highest peak seven times. "Failure gives you a chance to refine your approach. You're taking risks more and more intelligently." In Athans' case, his setback taught him that it was important to choose a less challenging route for his first climb up Everest. Learning from past mistakes and making changes helped him to reach the top successfully.

    Failure also reminds us that things can go wrong—sometimes with disastrous results. Austrian Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner is the first woman to summit all 14 of the world's 8000-meter peaks without extra oxygen. In 2007, while climbing in Nepal, she was in an avalanche. Luckily, she survived, but two Spanish climbers died. The experience taught Kaltenbrunner that no matter how prepared a person is, bad things can still happen.The events of that day troubled her deeply, but in time, Kaltenbrunner decided she had to learn from the experience and move on. "I realized that I couldn't make the tragedy unhappen," she says, "and I couldn't stop climbing—this is my life."

    Accepting failure is not easy for many, though. We are often reluctant to admit failure because our professional reputations depend on success. However, things are slowly changing, notably in the fields of business and science. In the past decade, for instance, some scientific journals—mostly in medicine and conservation—have published reports of failed experiments. The belief is that the science community can also learn from "negative" results and that this can eventually lead to positive outcomes.

    In many ways, the business world already understands the value of negative results. To encourage entrepreneurship, the Netherlands-based ABN AMRO bank started an Institute of Brilliant Failures to learn more about what works and what doesn't in banking. Similarly, Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical corporation, has "R&D outcome celebrations"—failure parties—to study data about drugs that don't work. (Almost 90 percent of all drug trials fail, and the drugs cannot be sold.)

    In fact, one of the business world's most famous failures eventually became one of its biggest successes. In the early 1990s, Apple Corporation created a handheld device called the Apple Newton. The product, though unique at the time, was expensive and heavy; moreover, some of its most important features didn't work properly. Consequently, it became one of Apple's biggest failures, and in 1998, the company stopped selling it. However, Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, believed the product had potential and he began to explore ways of improving it. In time, this led to the creation of the iPhone and the iPad, two of the company's most successful products.

    The story of the Apple Newton can teach us another important lesson about failure. Not only should we try to learn from it; if we want to succeed, we must also be persistent. Though Apple stopped selling the Newton in 1998, the first iPhone wasn't available until 2007. It took a lot of research and hard work to go from the Apple Newton to iPhone, but in the end, the effort paid off.

    Ultimately, there is a lot we can learn by studying mistakes. Perhaps the most important lesson is that failure and success are two sides of the same coin. One truly cannot exist without the other.

What does Pete Athans learn from his mountain climbing experiences? ( )

No matter what happens, life will go on.

No matter how hard we try, we may still fail.

Failures give us a chance to improve our approach.

The most important thing is to avoid unnecessary mistakes.

本题考查Pete Athans从他的登山经历中所学到的事。
定位到第二段Pete Athans所说的话“Failure gives you a chance to refine your approach.失败给予了你改进方法的机会”，refine：改进、提炼，故C选项符合题意。