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  3. Overall, belief in climate change has declined in the American public from roughly 75 percent to 55 percent between 2008 and 201

Overall, belief in climate change has declined in the American public from roughly 75 percent to 55 percent between 2008 and 201

admin2014-09-05  61
问题     Overall, belief in climate change has declined in the American public from roughly 75 percent to 55 percent between 2008 and 2011, with a recent rebound to 62 percent in the fall of 2011, the Brookings Institution survey finds. One noted reason for the rebound was personal experiences with warmer fall and winter temperatures.
    Though this kind of weather disruption is what climate scientists predict, they hesitate to place too much emphasis on one or two unusual seasons as a trend that changes public opinion. If next winter is more normal, the public may get the wrong impression about the dangers of climate change. Better for science to be more convincing.
    But there’s the rub. The American public is generally illiterate when it comes to science. And when American scientists complain about public illiteracy and lethargy on the vitally important subject of climate change, they also have themselves to blame.
    Generally, those who know the most about climate—and other important scientific fields—are locked up in their university ivory towers and conference rooms, speaking a language only they can understand. And they speak mostly to each other, not to the general public, policymakers, or business people—not to those who can actually make things happen.
    This is dangerous. We live in an age when scientific issues permeate our social, economic, and political culture. People must be educated about science and the scientific process if we are to make rational and informed decisions that affect our future. But instead, the relative absence of academics and academic scholarship in the public discourse creates a vacuum into which uninformed, wrong, and downright destructive viewpoints get voiced and take hold.
    Here’s a typical example. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh argued that " The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone. . . " In fact, the spill created extensive damage to wide ranging marine habitats as well as the Gulf Coast’ s fishing and tourism industries. Long-term impacts are still unclear as scientists continue to monitor underwater plumes of dissolved oil that lie along the bottom.
    The fact is that today’ s scientists are indeed lost to the academy. The failure begins with training in doctoral programs and continues through professional development where the constant immersion in academic seminars and journals serves to weaken scientists’ literacy in the language of public, economic, and political discourse. Scientists limit involvement in such "outside activities" because tenure and promotion are based primarily on publication in top-tier academic journals.
    In my view, few contemporary issues warrant critical analysis by problem-focused researchers more than environmental sustainability, and particularly climate change. Universities need to train emerging and seasoned scholars in the skills of communicating science to the public and policy makers. We need to develop a new generation of scholars for whom the role of public intellectual is not an anachronism. Without such changes, the climate change debate devolves into a " logic schism" where the ideological extremes dominate the conversation and the space for solutions disappears into a rhetorical shouting match.
In the author’ s opinion, in order to enhance public’ s awareness of climate change, the universities should______.
选项 A、make more videos to popularize scientific findings
B、encourage scientist to communicate more with the public
C、make more public intellectuals of social scientists
D、restrain the time allocated by scientists to unpractical researches
答案B
解析 作者在最后一段中提到，为了使科学家在公共事务上掌握更多的话语权，大学应该对学者们进行培训，提升他们向公众和决策者普及科学知识的技能(Universities need to trainemerging and seasoned scholars in the skills of communicating science to the public andpolicy makers)。也就是，大学应该采取措施，积极鼓励科学家与大众沟通，[B]为正确答案。[A]的内容文中并未提及。[D]也不对，原文只说大学应该鼓励科学家与社会沟通，并没有反过来说要限制他们的研究时间。[C]属于偷换概念，原文并没有特指将什么样的科学家变成公共知识分子，是社会科学家还是自然科学家。
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