首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
How science goes wrong Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. [A] A simple idea underlies
How science goes wrong Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. [A] A simple idea underlies
admin
2017-01-16
18
问题
How science goes wrong
Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself.
[A] A simple idea underlies science: "trust, but verify". Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed extreme self-satisfaction. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying, damaging the whole of science, and of humanity.
[B] Too many of the findings are the result of cheap experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated (复制). Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 "milestone" studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist worries that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are nonsense. In 2000-10, roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later withdrawn because of mistakes or improperness.
What a load of rubbish
[C] Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it blows money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of hindered progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.
[D] One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the Second World War, it was still a rarefied (小众的) pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest account, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to "publish or perish (消亡)" has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs strive for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, uncertain findings live on to mislead.
[E] Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the choose-the-most-profitable of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has polished a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results based on his instinct. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, it is more likely that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a nut of the statistical noise. Such fake correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
[F] Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis (假设) are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. "Negative results" now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
[G] The holy process of peer review is not all it is praised to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
If it’s broke, fix it
[H] All this makes a shaky foundation for an enterprise dedicated to discovering the truth about the world. What might be done to shore it up? One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that screen through untold crowds of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early stream of deceptive results from genome sequencing (基因组测序) into a flow of truly significant ones.
[I] Ideally, research protocols (草案) should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to manipulate the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are. (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
[J] The most enlightened journals are already showing less dislike of tedious papers. Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which give out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication. And growing numbers of scientists, especially young ones, understand statistics. But these trends need to go much further. Journals should allocate space for "uninteresting" work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it. Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
[K] Science still commands enormous—if sometimes perplexed—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by cheap research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.
Knowing what is false and knowing what is true are equally important to science.
选项
答案
F
解析
本题是基于如今的科学研究不重视证伪的情况的陈述,可知答案应在What a load of rubbish标题下的内容查找。由Knowing what is false,knowing what is true和important可定位到F段第3句。本题采用的比较结构是be equally important,而原文采用的是as important as…,语义相同,且题目中的比较对象与原文相符,故本题是对F段第3句的同义转述,选F。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/DBi7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
Somepeoplesaythetraditionalcalendarof180daysnolongermeetstheneedsofAmericansociety.Theypointoutthatstudents
A、Thetwospeakersarefromdifferentcountries.B、Themangetsalongverywellwithhisparents.C、Britishparentsneverinterf
Foryears,highschoolstudentshavereceivedidenticaltextbooksastheirclassmates.Evenasstudentshavedifferentlearning
皮影戏(shadowplay)是中国古老的民间传统艺术。据史书记载,它始于汉代,盛于唐宋。皮影(shadowpuppet)最初由纸制成,后来改由驴皮或牛皮制作,因此而得名。皮影在中国乃至世界上都具有很高的艺术价值,被世界多国博物馆收藏。人们认为陕西的皮
Nextmonth,NewYorkstudentsingradesthreethrougheightwilltakethestate’sstandardizedtests:threedaysofexamsdevote
BullyingandChildrenA)Whatyoursonisdescribingisbullying,plainandsimple.Althoughitislateintheschoolyear,yous
Timeisrunningoutforgovernmentstooverhaulregulationofglobalbanksthathavebecomebiggerandmorepowerfulsincethes
ImmigrationisregardedbythepublicasthebiggestissuefacingBritishsociety,amajornewsurveytakingstockofthestate
A、Husbandandwife.B、Brotherandsister.C、Teacherandstudent.D、Designerandcustomer.D生活交际类,事实细节题。男士说如果你对卧室颜色的设计满意的话,我下周就开始
中国是世界上最多产的(prolific)图书生产国之一,但中国人的阅读率偏低。近几十年来,中国的书籍供应量大大增加,但人们对书籍的兴趣却跟不上其增加的速度。一项调查显示,2012年中国人年平均读书4.39本。这一数据与一些发达国家有很大差距。如美国人年平均
随机试题
《三元里》中谴责清统治者向英人屈膝妥协的诗句是()
发行推广
被认为是“民族固有法”的法律体系是_______。
普鲁卡因药液中加入肾上腺素的临床目的是()
男性,2岁,发热伴咳嗽,诊断为链球菌肺炎,用抗生素治疗的疗程应持续至体温正常后
下列有关行政机关申请法院强制执行的说法正确的有:()
(2006年考试真题)责任中心之间无论是进行内部结算还是进行责任转账,都可以利用内部转移价格作为计价标准。()
根据土地增值税法律制度的规定,下列情形中,纳税人应当进行土地增值税清算的有()。(2010年)
水资源短缺一直是我国在人口增长、城市化和工业化过程中所面临的一个长期的、趋势性的问题,成为制约我国经济发展的一大瓶颈。专家认为,海水淡化是沿海及临海地区最经济、最实用、最灵活的水危机解决方案。随着技术的进步,海水淡化的成本将逐步降低,最终将达到与成本正逐步
甲以自己为受益人给妻子购买了人身意外伤害险,后设计杀害了妻子,并以妻子意外死亡为由,申请并获得保险金80万元。(2017年一专一第20题)甲的行为应该认定为()。
最新回复
(
0
)