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  3. Science is an enterprise concerned with gaining information about causality, or the relationship between cause and effect. A sim

Science is an enterprise concerned with gaining information about causality, or the relationship between cause and effect. A sim

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问题    Science is an enterprise concerned with gaining information about causality, or the relationship between cause and effect. A simple example of a cause is the movement of a paddle as it strikes a ping-pong ball; the effect is the movement of the ball through the air. In psychology and other sciences, the word "cause" is often replaced by the term "independent variable". This term implies that the experimenter is often "free" to vary the independent variable as he or she desires (for example, the experimenter can control the speed of the paddle as it strikes the ball). The term "dependent variable" replaces the word "effect", and this term is used because the effect depends on some characteristic of the independent variable (the flight of the ball depends on the speed of the paddle). The conventions of science demand that both the independent and dependent variables be observable events, as is the case in the ping-pong example. In the case of biorhythm theory, the independent variable is the number of days that have elapsed between a person’s date of birth and some test day. The dependent variable is the person’s level of performance on some specified task on the test day. Notice that although the experimenter is not free to choose a birthday for a given individual, persons with different dates of birth can be tested on the same day, or a single subject can be tested on several different days.
   In order to predict the relationship between independent and dependent variables, many scientific theories make use of what are called intervening variables. Intervening variables are purely theoretical concepts that cannot be observed directly. To predict the flight of a ping-pong ball, Newtonian physics relies on a number of intervening variables, including force, mass, air resistance, and gravity. You can probably anticipate that the intervening variables of biorhythm theory are the three bodily cycles with their specified time periods. It should be emphasized that not all psychological theories include intervening variables, and some psychologists object to their use precisely because they are not directly observable.
   The final major component of a scientific theory is its syntax, or the rules and definitions that state how the independent and dependent variables are to be measured, and that specify the relationships among independent variables, intervening variables, and dependent variables. It is the syntax of biorhythm theory that describes how to use a person’s birthday to calculate the current status of the three cycles. The syntax also relates the cycles to the dependent variable, performance, by stating that positive cycles should cause high levels of performance whereas low or critical cycles should cause low performance levels. To summarize, the components of a scientific theory can be divided into four major categories: independent variables, dependent variables, intervening variables, and syntax.
According to biorhythm theory, ______.
选项 A、one’s behavior can be predicted by knowing his or her birthday
B、nobody can choose his or her date of birth as he or she wishes
C、an individual’s performance is irrelevant to his or her birthday
D、a person’s level of performance varies according to the test date
答案A
解析 这是一道细节题。文章最后一段指出：正是生物节律理论的措辞法描述了如何根据一个人的出生日期来估算三种循环的现状；通过说明积极的循环可能促成上佳的表现，而消极或临界循环则可能导致不佳的表现。这说明，生物节律理论认为，根据人们的生日可以推测他们的表现。A说“根据某个人的生日，可以预知其行为”，这与文章的意思符合。与B有关的信息是第一段的最后一句话，文中是说“虽然实验者不能为某个特定的人自由选择出生日期”，而这只是一个客观事实，并不是生物节律理论的观点，所以B不对；C与文章的意思相反；与D有关的信息是第三段的倒数第二句话，文中是说“因变量就是这个人在测试当天执行某项具体任务中的表现水平”，并没有说表现水平根据测试日期而有区别，所以D不对。
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