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考研英语阅读DAY68
[摘要]
DAY68 Reading comprehension Direction: In this part, there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished statements, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the on e ...
DAY68 Reading comprehension Direction: In this part, there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished statements, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the on e that you think is the correct answer. Passage 1“Finagle” is not a word that most people associate with science. One reason why science is so respected these days is that the image of the scientist is of one who dispassionately collects data in an impartial search for truth. In any debateover intelligence, schooling, bias, energythe phrase “science says” usually squashes the opposition. But scientists have long acknowledged the existence of a “finagle factor”a tendency by many scientists to give a helpful nudge to the data to produce desired results. The latest example of the finagle factor in action comes from Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard biologist, who has examined the important 19th century work of Dr. Samuel George Morton. Morton was famous in his time not only for amassing a huge collection of skulls but also for analyzing the cranial capacity, or brain size, of the skulls as a measure of intelligence. He concluded that whites had the largest brains, that the brains of Indians and blacks were smaller, and therefore, that whites constitute a superior race. Gould went back to Mortons original data and concluded that the results were an example of the finagle at work. “I have reanalyzed Mortons data,” Gould wrote last week in the journal science, “and I find that they are a patchwork of assumption and finagling, controlled, probably unconsciously, by his conventional a priori ranking (his folks on top, slaves on the bottom).” Morton reached his conclusions, Gould found, by leaving out embarrassing data, using incorrect procedures, making simple arithmetical mistakes (always in his favor) and changing his criteria — again, always in favor of his argument. Left alone, that finding would not be particularly disturbing. Morton has been thoroughly discredited by now. Scientists do not believe that brain size reflects intelligence, and Mortons brand of raw racism is out of style. But Gould goes on to say that Mortons story is only “admittedly egregious example of a common problem in scientific work”. Some of the leading figures in science are believed to have used the finagle factor. One of them is Gregor Mendel, the Bohemian monk whose work is the foundation of modern genetics. The success of Mendels work was based on finding a threetoone ratio in the dominant and recessive characteristics of hybrid plants he was breeding. He found that ratio. But scientists recently have gone back to his data and have found that the results are literally too good to be true. Like Morton，Mendel gave him the benefit of the doubt. No one suggested that the scientists were dishonest; it was just that they quite naturally had a strong tendency to find data that would support their beliefs. The same tendency is observable in almost every controversial area of science todaythe fight over race and intelligence, the dispute about generic vs. trade name drugs, the argument about nuclear energy, and so on. It is only occasionally that the finagle factor breaks out into pure dishonesty. One example seems to be the research of Cyril Burt, the British scientists whose studies were used to support the belief that intelligence is mostly inherited. It now appears that Burt invented not only a good part of his results but also made up two collaborators whose names appear on his scientific papers. The moral that Gould draws from his study of Morton in not that scientists are wicked but that they are just human beings, like the rest of us, and so should be subject to skepticism like the rest of us.“The culprit（犯人） in this tale is a naive belief that pure objectivity can be attained by human beings rooted in cultural traditions of shared beliefand a consequent failure of selfexamination.”Gould said. 1. This passage is mainly
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