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  3. It is a curious paradox that we think of the physical sciences as "hard", the social sciences as "soft", and the biological scie

It is a curious paradox that we think of the physical sciences as "hard", the social sciences as "soft", and the biological scie

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问题     It is a curious paradox that we think of the physical sciences as "hard", the social sciences as "soft", and the biological sciences as somewhere in between. This is interpreted to mean that our knowledge of physical systems is more certain than our knowledge of biological systems, and these in turn are more certain than our knowledge of social systems. In terms of our capacity to sample the relevant universes, however, and the probability that our images of these universes are at least approximately correct, one suspects that a reverse order is more reasonable. We are able to sample earth’s social systems with some degree of confidence that we have a reasonable sample of the total universe being investigated. Our knowledge of social systems, therefore, while it is in many ways extremely inaccurate, is not likely to be seriously overturned by new discoveries. Even the folk knowledge in social systems on which ordinary life is based in earning, spending, organizing, marrying, taking part in political activities, fighting and so on, is not very dissimilar from the more sophisticated images of the social system derived from the social sciences, even though it is built upon the very imperfect samples of personal experience.
    In contrast, our image of the astronomical universe, of even of earth’s geological history, can easily be subject to revolutionary changes as new data comes in and new theories are worked out. If we define the "security" of our image of various parts of the total system as the probability of their suffering significant changes, then we would reverse the order of hardness and see the social sciences as the most secure, the physical sciences as the least secure, and again the biological sciences as somewhere in between. Our image of the astronomical universe is the least secure of all simply because we observe such a fantastically small sample of it and its record-keeping is trivial as compared with the rich records of the social systems, or even the limited records of biological systems. Records of the astronomical universe, despite the fact that we see distant things as they were long ago, are limited in the extreme.
    Even in regard to such a close neighbor as the moon, which we have actually visited, theories about its origin and history are extremely different, contradictory, and hard to choose among. Our knowledge of physical evolution is incomplete and highly insecure.
The word "paradox" (Para. 1, Line 1) means________.
选项 A、implication
B、contradiction
C、interpretation
D、confusion
答案B
解析 词义理解题。paradox出现在第一段第一句。该句中，it是形式主语，that引导的从句是真正的主语。该句提到，我们认为自然科学是“硬科学”，社会科学是“软科学”，生物科学介乎二者之间。接着第三句提到，但从我们取样研究的情况以及我们对这些领域的认识大体正确的角度来说，反过来讲更合理。由此可知，第一句中讲到的观点看法与实际情况相反。选项中，只有contradiction(矛盾，不一致)符合文意，故答案为B项。paradox意为“自相矛盾，悖论”。implication意为“暗示”；interpretation意为“解释，演绎”；confusion意为“困惑，骚乱”。
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