2. 外语
  3. The first pre-election poll, or " straw vote" , as it was then called, was conducted by the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian before the

The first pre-election poll, or " straw vote" , as it was then called, was conducted by the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian before the

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问题    The first pre-election poll, or " straw vote" , as it was then called, was conducted by the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian before the 1824 presidential election. This straw vote and the many that followed it really registered nothing but local opinion. However, as communications improved and elections were won by closer and closer margins, newspapers and journals tried desperately to satisfy their readers’ curiosity in more reliable ways.
   Before the 1928 elections, no fewer than eighty-five publications made private inquiries, generally by means of questionnaires (问卷调查表) sent to subscribers (订户) and by telephone surveys. The principle common to all these inquiries was that they depended on quantity rather than quality: little effort was made to reach representatives of all segments (部分) of the population. Still, the erroneous belief persisted that the greater the number of questionnaires, the more accurate the results would be. The record was held by the American monthly Literary Digest, which sent out millions of postcards with short and pointed questions before each election, and received many hundreds of thousands of replies. In fact, in 1932, the forecast of Literary Digest was off by only 1 percent.
   In view of such striking achievements, it seemed rather impertinent (粗鲁的) for the young American journalist, George Gallup, to claim that large numbers were irrelevant, and that equally accurate or better predictions could be made with a small but carefully selected sample of the population and a small team of skilled interviewers.
   In 1936, it took Gallup a long time to convince thirty-five newspaper editors that his system was much cheaper than the customary mass inquiries and that it could provide surprisingly accurate predictions. The editors finally agreed, on condition that if Gallup’ s predictions were less accurate than those obtained by the tried method of the Literary Digest, he would have to refund (赔偿) the entire cost of the investigation. Although the Literary Digest broke its own record by obtaining two million replies to its electoral postcards that year, its prediction was wrong by 19 percent, whereas Gallup’ s was off by less than 1 percent.
We can infer from the passage that in the early 1930s______.
选项 A、Gallup was a famous journalist
B、the Literary Digest like to break records
C、the Literary Digest was the biggest monthly in America
D、the method of the Literary Digest was popular and well-received
答案D
解析 推理题。根据文章第四段第一句可知，盖洛普费了很大劲才说服编辑们，由此可以推断他当时没有很大的影响力，故选项A(盖洛普是个有名的记者)错误。根据第四段第三句可知，《文学摘要》打破了自己的记录，但并不能由此推断出选项B(《文学摘要》喜欢破纪录)。选项C(《文学摘要》是美国最大的月刊)文中从未提及。根据第二段最后一句可知，《文学摘要》对1932年的选举预测误差仅为1％，而且根据第四段第二句可知，如果盖洛普的预测没有《文学摘要》的准确，就要承担所有费用。通过这两点可以推断出《文学摘要》采用的方法是大多数人所接受的，与选项D(《文学摘要》的方法很流行而且被认可)相符，故本题选D。
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