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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.
Based on the passage, causality may have the meaning that ______.
选项 A、cause and effect can be independent of each other
B、there is hardly anything that happens without a cause
C、dependent and independent variables affect each other
D、cause and effect may vary respectively in most events
答案B
解析 这是一道词义题。题干中的信号词为causality，出自于文章第一段第一句话中。文章第一段指出：有关原因的一个简单例子就是乒乓球拍的运动，因为它击打了乒乓球，其结果就是球在空中运动；在心理学和其他学科中，“自变量”这个术语意味着，实验者通常可以随其所愿，“自由”改变自主变量(比如，在球拍击打球时，实验者可以控制球拍的速度)；人们使用“因变量”这个术语，是因为结果取决于自主变量的某些特性(球的飞行取决于球拍击打的速度)。这说明，该词的意思可能是“如果没有原因，就不会有什么结果”。B说“如果没有原因，几乎不可能发生什么”，这与文章的意思符合。A与文章的意思相反；文中没有说因变量和自变量彼此影响，所以C不对；文中没有提到D。
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