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  3. Senator Barack Obama likes to joke that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination has been going on so long, babies

Senator Barack Obama likes to joke that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination has been going on so long, babies

admin2011-03-11  62
问题     Senator Barack Obama likes to joke that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination has been going on so long, babies have been born, and they’ re already walking and talking. That’s nothing. The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so long, its early participants have stopped walking and talking, because they’re already dead.
    It’s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C. P.  Snow delivered his famous "Two Cultures" lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the "gulf of mutual incomprehension", the "hostility and dislike" that divided the world’s "natural scientists", its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its "literary intellectuals", a group that, by Snow’s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn’t a scientist.  His critique set off a frenzy of desperation that continues to this day, particularly’in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers lament the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.
    Yet a few scholars believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems.  Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.
    Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr. Wilson’s evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published "Evolution for Everyone". In Dr. Wilson’s view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally? "There are more similarities than differences between the humanities and the sciences, and some of the stereotypes have to be altered," Dr. Wilson said, "Darwin, for example, established his entire evolutionary theory on the basis of his observations of natural history, and most of that information was qualitative, not quantitative. "
    As he and Dr. Heywood envision the program, courses under the New Humanities rubric would be offered campus-wide, in any number of departments, including history, literature, philosophy, sociology, law and business. The students would be introduced to basic scientific tools like statistics and experimental design and to liberal arts staples like the importance of analyzing specific texts or documents closely, identifying their animating ideas and comparing them with the texts of other immortal minds.
By citing the example of Darwin, Dr. Wilson intends to show that______.
选项 A、qualitative information is more valuable than quantitative observations
B、it is preferable to take the mutual advantage of science and humanities
C、science has more similarities rather than differences than humanities
D、scientists should base their theory on qualitative information
答案B
解析 此题考查基于原文多处细节的推理及理解句子之间关系的能力。根据题干中的词汇Darwin及Dr.Wilson，我们可以得知所考内容集中在第四段，题目问：威尔逊博士举达尔文的例子，想要表明什么?当问及举例的目的时，我们需要找到例子所对应的观点。原文中“In Dr.Wilson’s view，...demands a crossover approach，the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously，so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?”就是威尔逊博士的观点，其中the two cultures指的是自然科学和人文科学，那么他的观点就是“需要运用同时运用两种思维方式，并将其作为统合两种科学的模板”。综合以上信息，可以得知B选项正确。
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