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
Read the following passage carefully and then write a summary of it in English in about 150 words. A simple idea underpins s
Read the following passage carefully and then write a summary of it in English in about 150 words. A simple idea underpins s
admin
2015-09-25
28
问题
Read the following passage carefully and then write a summary of it in English in about 150 words.
A simple idea underpins 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 complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.
Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis(see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 "landmark" 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 frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000—2010 roughly 80, 000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
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 squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.
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 pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m—7m active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to "publish or perish" has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cutthroat. Full professors in America earned on average $ 135, 000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for every academic post. Nowadays verification(the replication of other people’s results)does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.
Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking 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 pepped up a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results "based on a gut feeling". And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise. Such spurious correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, going senile or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis 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.
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up 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.
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 sift through untold oodles of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of truly significant ones.
Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with 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, but compliance is patchy.)Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
The most enlightened journals are already becoming less averse to humdrum papers. Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which dish 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.
Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—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 shoddy research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.
选项
答案
In this passage, the author points out a serious problem existing in modern science, that is, scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying, which has deteriorated the whole science and humanity. In the latter passage, the author analyzed the reasons with the detailed examples as proofs. The first reason is the competitiveness of science. The greatly increasing population of the scientists imposed fierce competition and forced them to publish their articles regardless of the academic quality. What’s more, high rejection rates of the leading journals encourage negatively researchers to exclude inconvenient data from results based only on sensations to optimize their research and win the opportunity to be published. Later on, the author offers some suggestions to solve the problem. One priority is to make disciplines tighten standards. Journals should spare space for "uninteresting" work and accept those papers concerned with the "negative results". Government funding agencies should set aside money to support and encourage replication. Peer review should be tightened. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules. At last, the author restates and emphasizes the importance for science to be right and its capacity to be corrected. The false researches can only hinder the process of understanding.
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/IOLO777K
0
考博英语
相关试题推荐
Ifincomeistransferredfromrichpersonstopoorpersonstheproportioninwhichdifferentsortsofgoodsandservicesarepro
Ifincomeistransferredfromrichpersonstopoorpersonstheproportioninwhichdifferentsortsofgoodsandservicesarepro
Smallbusinessownersmustaccepttheburdensofentrepreneurship.Beinginbusinessforyour-selfrequiresyourfullattention
Accordingtoonesurveyof12,000people,about30percentofthosemakingNewYear’sresolutionssaytheydon’tevenkeepthem
Inapurelybiologicalsense,fearbeginswiththebody’ssystemforreactingtothingsthatcanharmus—theso-calledfight-o
Accordingto______acrosstherelevantresearchcommunity,thepublishedattackrepresentsanextremepositioninitsdemandsfor
Forgetfootball.Atmanyhighschools,thefiercestcompetitionisbetweenCokeandPepsioverexclusive"pouringrights"tosel
(北京大学2006年试题)LastyearFrenchdriverskilled【1】than5,000peopleontheroadsforthefirsttimeindecades.Creditgoesla
Afterseveralyearsofisolationonthedesertedisland,hebeganto______ofevergettingbackhome.
随机试题
经济全球化的决定力量是()。
管理理论丛林包括的主要学派有()
A.活动后血尿伴肾绞痛B.排尿中断伴剧痛向尿道放射C.两者皆有D.两者皆无肾输尿管结石
狂犬病病理变化中特异的且具有诊断价值的病变为
工程建设参与各方通用的监理工作表格包括()。
下列关于放款执行部门的职责说法正确的有()。[2015年10月真题]
A、 B、 C、 D、 A图形中线条之间的交点数依次是4、3、2、1、(0),选项中只有图形A中线条之间没有交点。
人类发展进步的一个重要表现,就是人类对世界的认识程度越来越深,对风险的控制能力越来越强。随着移动社会化媒体的广泛应用、物联网的广泛覆盖,人与人、物与物、人与物之间的联接越来越多,世界变得越来越小。更重要的是,随着大数据处理能力和云计算技术的日益成熟,人们对
假设模拟信号的最高频率为5MHz,采样频率必须大于(14),才能使得到的样本信号不失真,如果每个样本量化为256个等级,则传输的数据速率是(15)。
【26】【37】
最新回复
(
0
)