In 2007, Mr. Hungerman was doing research on sibling behavior when he noticed that children in the same families tend to be born at the same time of year. Meanwhile, Ms. Buckles was examining the economic factors that lead to multiple births, and coming across what looked like a relationship between mothers' education levels and when children were born.

亨格曼2007年研究兄弟姐妹的行为时，他注意到一个家庭里的孩子往往都在同样的季节出生。与此同时，巴克尔斯也正在考察导致生育多个孩子的经济因素，他偶然发现母亲的受教育水平和孩子的出生时间之间看上去存在关联。

'I was just playing around with the data and getting an unexpected result,' Ms. Buckles recalls of the tendency that less educated mothers were having children in winter.

巴克尔斯回忆道，我只是在摆弄数据，却得到了意想不到的结果，那就是教育程度较低的母亲往往会在冬天生孩子。

The two economists, whose offices are across from one another, were comparing notes one day and realized that they might have stumbled across an answer to the season-of-birth puzzle that previous research had overlooked.

这两位经济学家的办公室正好相对，某天他们比对各自的研究笔记，意识到他们可能偶然找出了此前的研究一直忽视的出生季节之谜的答案。

A key assumption of much of that research is that the backgrounds of children born in the winter are the same as the backgrounds of children born at other times of the year. It must be something that happens to those winter-born children that accounts for their faring poorly.

此前大多数这类研究的一个重要假定是，冬天出生的孩子与其他时候出生的孩子具备同样的背景。这些冬天出生的孩子肯定是发生了什么事情所以才命途多舛。