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  3. Almost eight decades ago, the American educator Abraham Flexner published an article entitled The Usefulness of Useless Knowledg

Almost eight decades ago, the American educator Abraham Flexner published an article entitled The Usefulness of Useless Knowledg

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问题     Almost eight decades ago, the American educator Abraham Flexner published an article entitled The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. In it, he argued that the most powerful intellectual and technological breakthroughs usually emerged from research that initially appeared "useless", without much relevance to real life.
    As a result, it was vital, Flexner said, that these "useless" efforts should be supported, even if they did not produce an immediate payback, because otherwise the next wave of innovation sim ply would not occur. "Curiosity, which may or may not produce something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking, " he declared.
    In 1929, Flexner persuaded a wealthy American family, the Bambergers, to use some of their donations to fund the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton to support exactly this kind of "undirected" research.
    And it paid off: brilliant Jewish scientists fleeing from Nazi Germany, such as Albert Einstein, gathered at the IAS to explore undirected ideas. And while some of these, such as Einstein’ s own work developing his earlier theory of relativity, did not initially seem valuable, many eventually produced powerful applications (though after many decades).
    "Without Einstein’ s theory, our GPS tracking devices would be inaccurate by about seven miles, " writes Robbert Dijkgraaf, the current director of the IAS, in the foreword to a newly released reprint of Flexner’ s article. Concepts such as quantum mechanics (量子力学) or superconductivity also seemed fairly useless at first—but yielded huge dividends at a later date.
    The reason why the IAS is re-releasing Flexner’ s article now is that scientists such as Dijkgraaf fear this core principle is increasingly under threat. The Trump administration has released a projected budget that threatens to reduce funding for the arts, science and educational groups. Many republicans believe that research is better financed by business or philanthropists (慈善家) than by government. But one striking fact about the past century is how much American innovation originated in federal projects, Silicon Valley would never have boomed were it not for the fact that state funding enabled the development of the World Wide Web, for example.
Examples of initially "useless" research include all of the following EXCEPT_________.
选项 A、quantum mechanics
B、theory of relativity
C、superconductivity
D、GPS tracking devices
答案D
解析 细节题。题干是问“最初‘无用’研究的例子包括以下内容，除了________。”ABCD四个选项都曾在文章中提到，但“GPS定位设备”只是作为说明爱因斯坦理论起作用的例子，不属于“无用的”研究，故选D。
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