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  3. Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus become part of the greatest story ever told. Man

Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus become part of the greatest story ever told. Man

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问题      Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus become part of the greatest story ever told. Many things have changed in the intervening years. The hotel industry worries more about overbuilding than overcrowding, and if they had to meet an unexpected influx, few inns would have a manager to accommodate the weary guests. Now it is the census taker that does the traveling in the fond hope that a highly mobile population will stay long enough to get a good sampling.  Methods of gathering, recording, and evaluating information have presumably been improved a great deal. And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to obtain a simple head count as an adequate basis for levying taxes,  now batteries of complicated statistical series furnished by governmental agencies and private organizations are eagerly scanned and interpreted by sages and seers to get a clue to future events. The Bible does not tell us how the Roman census takers made out, and as regards our more immediate concern, the reliability of present day economic forecasting,  there are considerable differences of opinion. They were aired at the celebration of tile 125th anniversary of the American Statistical Association. There was the thought that business forecasting might well be on its way from an art to a science, and some speakers talked about newfangled computers and high-falutin mathematical system in terms of excitement and endearment which we, at least in our younger years when these things mattered, would have associated more readily with the description of a fair maiden. But others pointed to the deplorable record of highly esteemed forecasts and forecasters with a batting average below that of the Mets, and the President-elect of the Association cautioned that "high powered statistical methods are usually in order where the facts are crude and inadequate, the exact contrary of what crude and inadequate statisticians assume." We left his birthday party somewhere between hope and despair and with the conviction, not really newly acquired, that proper statistical methods applied to ascertainable facts have their merits in economic forecasting as long as neither forecaster nor public is deluded into mistaking the delineation of probabilities and trends for a prediction of certainties of mathematical exactitude.
The American Statistical Association ______.
选项 A、is converting statistical study from an art to a science
B、has an excellent record in business forecasting
C、is neither hopeful nor pessimistic
D、speaks with mathematical exactitude
答案A
解析 细节归纳题，这是从第六句开始讲的一种观点。圣经并没有告诉我们罗马的人口调查员是怎么调查统计的。至于我们当前更加关心的问题：目前经济预测的可靠性，意见分歧很大。在美国统计协会125周年庆祝活动上，人们大肆宣扬这些不同观点。有一种说法是经济预测可能正从文科转向理科发展。有些人兴高采烈地大谈新型计算机和非常高级的数学系统。”作者虽然没有明说，明眼人一看便知，艺术向科学的转变正是美国统计协会在把统计学从文科转向理科。所以A对。
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