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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

admin2010-03-19  66
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 message the author wishes the reader to get is ______.
选项 A、statisticians have not advanced since the days of the Roman
B、statistics is not as yet a science
C、statisticians love their machine
D、computer is hopeful
答案B
解析 细节归纳题。文章最后几句话。“连统计协会的主席也告诫说高能统计法在实际材料原始的地方一般发挥正常。这跟低级统计员所假定的正好相反。我们怀着忧“希”掺半的心情离开周年庆祝宴会，相信应用于确切材料上恰当的统计法在经济预测中有它的贡献，只要预测人员和公众不受蒙蔽，把所述的概率和趋势当作数学精确无比的预测就行。”
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