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  3. Science is an enterprise concerned with gaining information about causality, or the relationship between cause and effect. A sim

Science is an enterprise concerned with gaining information about causality, or the relationship between cause and effect. A sim

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问题    Science is an enterprise concerned with gaining information about causality, or the relationship between cause and effect. A simple example of a cause is the movement of a paddle as it strikes a ping-pong ball; the effect is the movement of the ball through the air. In psychology and other sciences, the word "cause" is often replaced by the term "independent variable". This term implies that the experimenter is often "free" to vary the independent variable as he or she desires (for example, the experimenter can control the speed of the paddle as it strikes the ball). The term "dependent variable" replaces the word "effect", and this term is used because the effect depends on some characteristic of the independent variable (the flight of the ball depends on the speed of the paddle). The conventions of science demand that both the independent and dependent variables be observable events, as is the case in the ping-pong example. In the case of biorhythm theory, the independent variable is the number of days that have elapsed between a person’s date of birth and some test day. The dependent variable is the person’s level of performance on some specified task on the test day. Notice that although the experimenter is not free to choose a birthday for a given individual, persons with different dates of birth can be tested on the same day, or a single subject can be tested on several different days.
   In order to predict the relationship between independent and dependent variables, many scientific theories make use of what are called intervening variables. Intervening variables are purely theoretical concepts that cannot be observed directly. To predict the flight of a ping-pong ball, Newtonian physics relies on a number of intervening variables, including force, mass, air resistance, and gravity. You can probably anticipate that the intervening variables of biorhythm theory are the three bodily cycles with their specified time periods. It should be emphasized that not all psychological theories include intervening variables, and some psychologists object to their use precisely because they are not directly observable.
   The final major component of a scientific theory is its syntax, or the rules and definitions that state how the independent and dependent variables are to be measured, and that specify the relationships among independent variables, intervening variables, and dependent variables. It is the syntax of biorhythm theory that describes how to use a person’s birthday to calculate the current status of the three cycles. The syntax also relates the cycles to the dependent variable, performance, by stating that positive cycles should cause high levels of performance whereas low or critical cycles should cause low performance levels. To summarize, the components of a scientific theory can be divided into four major categories: independent variables, dependent variables, intervening variables, and syntax.
The example of the ping-pong ball is used to ______.
选项 A、predict variations in a person’s performance
B、indicate a hard nut to crack in physics
C、prove a common feature most theories have
D、show the negligibility of intervening variables
答案C
解析 这是一道结构题。题干中的信号词为Ping-pong ball，出自文章第一段第二句话中。文章第一段第一句话说：科学是一种研究关注收集有关因果关系信息的事业。接着指出：有关原因的一个简单例子就是乒乓球拍的运动，因为它击打了乒乓球，其结果就是球在空中运动。随后提到了心理学、其他学科以及生物节律理论利用“自变量”和“因变量”术语的问题，指出：自变量和因变量都应该是能可以观察到的事实，正如乒乓球的例子所显示的那样。这说明，乒乓球的例子是用来说明“许多理论都有共同的特征”这一点的。C说“证明大多数理论的共同特征”，这与文章的意思符合。一个人的表现是生物节律理论关注的内容，与乒乓球的例子没有关系，所以A不对；文中没有提到B和D。
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