考研英语阅读理解命题思路透析和真题揭秘(11)

1998年Passage 3
 
Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gallileo's 17th century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet William Blake's harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century.
 
Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics - but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked "antiscience" in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R.Gross, a biologist at the University of Verginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon Haunted World, by Car Sagan of Cornell University.
 
Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as "The Flight from Science and Reason," held in New York City in 1995, and "Science in the Age of (Mis)information," which assembled last June near Buffalo.
 
Antiscience clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, philosophers and other academics who have questioned science's objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.
 
A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals that the antiscience tag has been attached to many other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.
 
Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, those manifesto, published in 1995, scorns science and longs for return to a pretechnological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience, as an essay in US News & World Report last May seemed to suggest.
 
The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth.
 
Indeed, some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. "The term ‘antiscience' can lump together too many, quite different things," notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and Anti Science. "They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened."

60. Paragraphs 2 and 3 are written to _____ .
[A] discuss the cause of the decline of science's power
[B] show the author's sympathy with scientists
[C] explain the way in which science develops
[D] exemplify the division of science and the humanities

[答案] D

[解题思路]

文章第一段的最后一句话指出"The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century"（在本世纪，（自然）科学与人文科学之间的裂痕更深了），而文章的下面两段就这一问题展开了详细的论述。因此显而易见D是正确选项，而其他三项都与两段的中心思想无关。

[题目译文]

第二、三段的写作目的在于                   。
[A] 讨论科学势力衰落的原因
[B] 表达作者对科学家们的同情
[C] 解释科学发展的方式
[D] 举例说明自然科学与人文科学的分离