When Ebright entered his first science fair (county level), he displayed his butterfly collection but won nothing. He learned that a good science fair project required real experiments and a genuine scientific question — not just collecting. This failure motivated him to conduct actual research in later fairs, leading to his award-winning discoveries.
Source: The Making of a Scientist, Chapter 6
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The passage doesn't directly state the lesson from a science fair failure in explicit words, so the examiner expects you to infer it from the context: Ebright's early project (just displaying a collection) won nothing, but his later projects involved real experiments (finding the purpose of gold spots on a monarch pupa) and won first place. The key point is that failure taught him science requires genuine experimentation, not mere collection. Keep the answer concise — 2 marks = ~40–50 words. Avoid over-detailing his later achievements here.