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  3. Man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe at the rate which has been spiraling upward for 10,000 y

Man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe at the rate which has been spiraling upward for 10,000 y

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问题     Man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe at the rate which has been spiraling upward for 10,000 years.
    The  【21】______ took a sharp upward leap with the invention of writing, but even  【22】______ it remained painfully slow for several centuries. The next great leap forward  【23】______ knowledge acquisition did not occur  【24】______ the invention of movable type in the 15th century by Gutenberg and others.  【25】______ to 1500, by the most optimistic  【26】______ Europe was producing books at a rate of 1000 titles per year. This means that it  【27】______ a full century to produce a library of 100,000 titles. By 1950, four and a half  【28】______ later, the rate had accelerated so sharply that Europe was producing 120,000 titles a year.  【29】______ once took a century now took only ten months. By 1960, a  【30】______ decade later, the rate had made another significant jump,  【31】______ a century’s work could be finished in seven and a half months.  【32】______ , by the mid-sixties, the output of books on a world  【33】______ , Europe included, approached the prodigious figure of 900 titles per day.
    One can  【34】______ argue that every book is a net gain for the advancement of knowledge. Nevertheless we find that the accelerative  【35】______ in book publication does, in fact, crudely  【36】______ the rate at which man discovered new knowledge. For example, prior to Gutenberg  【37】______ 11 chemical elements were known. Antimony, the 12th, was discovered  【38】______ about the time he was working on his invention. It was fully 200 years since the 11th, arsenic, had been discovered.  【39】______ the same rate of discovery continued, we would by now have added only two or three additional elements to the periodic table since Gutenberg.  【40】______ , in the 450 years after his time, certain people discovered some seventy additional elements. And since 1900 we have been isolating the remaining elements not at a rate of one every two centuries, but of one every three years.
选项 A、accumulation
B、development
C、knowledge
D、rate
答案D
解析 the rate“速率”，全文自始至终都在谈存储知识——出版书的速率问题。
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