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  3. He changed the future without ever winning a vote or commanding an army. All Albert Einstein did was having an idea. It’s not a

He changed the future without ever winning a vote or commanding an army. All Albert Einstein did was having an idea. It’s not a

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问题     He changed the future without ever winning a vote or commanding an army. All Albert Einstein did was having an idea. It’s not a particularly easy one to grasp in all its ramifications, but the basic insight he expressed in his 1905 paper on special relativity is almost childlike in its simplicity. And yet it ushered in a new golden age of physics and did much to shape the course of the 20th century.
    It also transformed the way the future is made: not with wars and revolutions but with scientific insights. That much is still true. But it is history that science precedes at the hands of the occasional lone genius. These days, vast networks of laboratories sponsored by governments are all pushing to find the new thing. Discovery and invention, in the developed countries at least, have become regularized. The insights of individuals are still important, of course, but the overall effort relies less on any one genius. "In the late 19th century, you had predominantly the private inventor," says Yale historian Daniel Kevles. "Now you have the organized inventor. Scientific fields are crowded with geniuses. Everybody’s working at the big problems all the time. "
    This shift in the methodology of discovery has complicated matters. It is chiefly responsible for the complexity of machines, but also for the growing complexity of the act of inventing and building. The Pentagon awards a contract for a new jet fighter to a prime contractor, which passed the various systems and subsystems and components down through layers of subcontractors. "Henry Ford could understand every piece of his assembly line," says Don Kash, a technology expert at George Mason University in Washington D. C., "Nobody can do that at Toyota. "
    What’s different now, though, is how comfortable we’ve become with such complexity.
    Innovation is part of our lives in a way it hasn’t been for previous generations. In 1970, Alvin Toffler argued in Future Shock that technology was changing society so quickly that a person in the span of a single lifetime would find himself a stranger in his own culture. Toffler’s book struck home because many people felt that new technologies were bringing about change at a pace that was disorienting and not a little disturbing. These days we’ve learned how to ride the rocket of innovation. "My father thought the world would be the same," says Kash. "My children wake up every day thinking the world will be different. "
The word "ramifications"(Line 3, Paragraph 1)most probably means
选项 A、radioactivity.
B、modification.
C、branches.
D、command.
答案C
解析 第一段第三行的单词ramifications的意思最有可能是什么?[A]放射性。[B]修改。[C]分支。[D]命令。解答此题可采用代入法。又根据语法知识，知道尽管他所有的ramifications不太好把握；但他在1905年那篇论文中阐述的关于狭义相对论的基本观点却能被看懂。所以ramifications和insight是语义上较为相关的。[A]radioactivity(放射性)、[B]modification(修改)和[D]command(命令)都与insight关系不大，只有branches与之意思较近，所以[C]为正确答案。
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