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
66
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
Self-esteemiswhatpeoplethinkaboutthemselves-whetherornottheyfeelvaluedandwhenfamilymembershaveself-respect,pr
Obviously,thepercapitaincomeofacountrydependsonmanythings,andanystatisticaltestthatdoesnottakeaccountofall
ThehistoryofAfrican-Americansduringthepast400yearsistraditionallynarrated【21】anongoingstraggleagainst【22】andindif
Anewbiotechnologyprocedurethatcouldbecomecommerciallyavailableinaslittleastwotofouryearsis"transgenesis",whic
Despitetheirmanydifferencesoftemperamentandofliteraryperspective,Emerson,Thoreau,Hawthorne,Melville,andWhitmansh
Mostofustellonetwoliesaday,accordingtoscientistswhostudythesethings.Andwerarelygetcaught,becausetheliesw
(北京大学2006年试题)LastyearFrenchdriverskilled【1】than5,000peopleontheroadsforthefirsttimeindecades.Creditgoesla
Onceapictureisprovedtobeaforgery,itbecomesquite______.(中南大学2007年试题)
Don’tkeepusin______anylonger.Telluswhathappenedsothatwecangiveyouahand.
Alicecamebackfromhertrip,______thehousecompletelydeserted.
随机试题
按照期望价值理论,为了调动职工积极性,必须处理好的关系是【】
通过cAMP-蛋白激酶:途径发挥作用的激素有
膀胱手术后病人的导尿管应
A、处理医疗事故工作B、首次医疗事故鉴定工作C、再次医疗事故鉴定工作D、申请再次鉴定E、医疗事故赔偿县(市)、区及地方医学会负责组织
2岁,男孩。在以肺炎住院期间,突然自觉呼吸困难,全身中毒症状加重,频繁咳嗽不止,血压正常。此患儿出现了哪个并发症
企业未使用银行汇票,要求银行退款时,应()。
在下列做法中,违反了《银行业从业人员职业操守》中保守商业秘密与客户隐私的原则的是()。
A公司是国内重型汽车行业的骨干企业,属于国家大型企业。公司始建于1968年,经过将近40年的发展,目前具有完整的产品设计、生产制造、检测调试和监测系统,产品覆盖军用越野车、重型载货车、客车专用地盘和高档客车三大类、15个系列、150多个品种。一、A公
2012年9月30日~10月7日中秋、国庆黄金周期间,全国纳入监测的119个直报景区点共接待游客3424.56万人次,同比增长20.96%;旅游收入17.65亿元,同比增长24.96%。9月29日至10月6日,民航全国累计发送55926班次,
有如下的程序段,其功能是将汉字信息“全国计算机等级考试”从屏幕底部移至顶部,请填空:SETTALKOFFSETSTATUSOFFx=”全国计算机等级考试”CLEARK=23D0WHILEK>0
最新回复
(
0
)