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.
Gallup’ s system proved to be______.
选项 A、much cheaper
B、a great failure
C、a huge success
D、much costly
答案C
解析 推理题。根据文章最后一句可知，盖洛普的预测误差还不到1％，足以说明他的方法很成功，与选项C(巨大的成功)相符，同时排除选项B(很大的失败)。选项A(成本很低)与选项D(成本很高)与文意不符。故本题选C。
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