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  3. In a provocative research paper from a couple of years ago, economist Robert Gordon of North-western University in the USA asked

In a provocative research paper from a couple of years ago, economist Robert Gordon of North-western University in the USA asked

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问题         In a provocative research paper from a couple of years ago, economist Robert Gordon of North-western University in the USA asked if economic growth has essentially come to an end. He wondered if the rapid economic and technological growth of the past few centuries might turn out to have been only a temporary thing.  Growth of this kind, he noted,  is certainly not the norm for human history.【B6】________________
    We stand today at the trailing edge of this explosion, and most people expect it to continue,  and perhaps even accelerate,  propelling us endlessly into a future that we can barely imagine.
    An alternative possibility, Gordon suggested, is that the past two hundred years reflected our intellectual expansion into an open domain of relatively easy discoveries.【B7】_______________
    Indeed, some evidence suggests that technological advance has slowed down, at least in certain areas. As of 1800, the fastest travel came by way of the horse; it then advanced to the steam train and motorcar, and still later to the airplane and jet aircraft, ultimately reaching speeds of 500 mph in the mid-1950s. Today, speed of travel remains stuck just where it was back then, and has even dropped due to the need to conserve fuel.
    【B8】____________________
    A team of scientists has recently done this using patent data over more than 200 years, and their analysis suggests that there is something real to the notion that innovation is slowing. The discovery of completely new technologies does seem to be increasingly less frequent.
    They find that the resulting record of patents and codes reveals some interesting trends.
    【B9】_____________________
    As time passes, in other words, it seems that single-technology inventions have become less common, whereas combinatorial invention has become the norm. For the past century at least, we’ve been making inventions faster than new technologies.
    The shift to combinatorial innovation also shows up in the comparative growth of the total number of patents, distinct codes and combinations of codes through time. Starting in 1790, all three grew exponentially for the first 80 years, during a period when most new inventions involved a new technology. Things changed abruptly around 1870, when growth in the number of distinct technology codes slowed, falling behind the number of patents and new combinations.
    【B10】___________________
    Since 1870 the process of invention has been driven almost entirely by combining existing technologies.
    [A]   We may have already tamed the most basic technologies—chemistry, sanitation, light, electronics and so on—and may face greater difficulties in making new discoveries with comparable impact on hu-man well-being.
    [B]  All in all, this analysis shows that the introduction of new technologies—currently, and also for quite a while in the recent past—plays a maximal role in fuelling invention.
    [C]   In other words, the nature of invention changed—people slowed in their invention of new technologies, but turned out new inventions just as quickly as before by putting old technologies together in new ways.
    [D]  In the nineteenth century, for example, nearly half of all patents were single-code inventions, meaning that inventors achieved their useful ends by exploiting a single, new technology. This proportion steadily decreased over the twentieth century, and currently stands at about 12%.
    [E]  In this combinatorial era, invention seems to have conformed to a fairly regular law reflecting a balance between exploitation of existing ideas and exploration for new ones.
    [F]   Before about 1700, humans had lived in pretty much the same way for many thousands of years. Then, abruptly, the transformation of the industrial revolution arrived, bringing waves of change through science and technology.
    [G]  This is all speculation, of course, as no one can truly see into the future. But it is possible to look back at data about the history of technologies, and of the inventions to which they gave rise, and to chart the pace of innovation over time.
【B9】
选项
答案D
解析 空格前指出专利和代码记录反映了某些耐人寻味的趋势，可见接下来应该会讲具体是什么趋势。空格后说到随着时间的流逝，单项技术发明越来越少，而组合式发明成为常态；虽然其描述的是一种趋势，但由in other words可知，空格处应该是关于专利和代码记录的具体情况，空格后用|n other words对之进行总结。D是以单项发明为例，指出其占专利发明总量的比例稳步下降，是一种趋势，与空格前的trends对应，也与空格后说的单项技术发明越来越少相符，使得in other words能够承接自然。故本题选D。
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