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  3. In a provocative research paper from a couple of years ago, economist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University in the USA asked

In a provocative research paper from a couple of years ago, economist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University in the USA asked

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问题    In a provocative research paper from a couple of years ago, economist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University in the USA asked if economic growth has essentially come to an end. He wondered if the rapid economic and technological growth of the past few centuries might turn out to have been only a temporary thing. Growth of this kind, he noted, is certainly not the norm for human history.
   【R1】__________We stand today at the trailing edge of this explosion, and most people expect it to continue, and perhaps even accelerate, propelling us endlessly into a future that we can barely imagine.
   An alternative possibility, Gordon suggested, is that the past two hundred years reflected our intellectual expansion into an open domain of relatively easy discoveries. 【R2】__________
   Indeed, some evidence suggests that technological advance has slowed down, at least in certain areas. As of 1800, the fastest travel came by way of the horse; it then advanced to the steam train and motorcar, and still later to the airplane and jet aircraft, ultimately reaching speeds of 500 mph in the mid-1950s. Today, speed of travel remains stuck just where it was back then, and has even dropped due to the need to conserve fuel.
   【R3】__________
   A team of scientists has recently done this using patent data over more than 200 years, and their analysis suggests that there is something real to the notion that innovation is slowing. The discovery of completely new technologies does seem to be increasingly less frequent.
   They find that the resulting record of patents and codes reveals some interesting trends.
   【R4】__________
   As time passes, in other words, it seems that single-technology inventions have become less common, whereas combinatorial invention has become the norm. For the past century at least, we’ve been making inventions faster than new technologies.
   The shift to combinatorial innovation also shows up in the comparative growth of the total number of patents, distinct codes and combinations of codes through time. Starting in 1790, all three grew exponentially for the first 80 years, during a period when most new inventions involved a new technology. Things changed abruptly around 1870, when growth in the number of distinct technology codes slowed, falling behind the number of patents and new combinations.
   【R5】__________
   Since 1870 the process of invention has been driven almost entirely by combining existing technologies.
   [A] We may have already tamed the most basic technologies—chemistry, sanitation, light, electronics and so on—and may face greater difficulties in making new discoveries with comparable impact on human well-being.
   [B] All in all, this analysis shows that the introduction of new technologies—currently, and also for quite a while in the recent past—plays a maximal role in fuelling invention.
   [C] In other words, the nature of invention changed—people slowed in their invention of new technologies, but turned out new inventions just as quickly as before by putting old technologies together in new ways.
   [D] In the nineteenth century, for example, nearly half of all patents were single-code inventions, meaning that inventors achieved their useful ends by exploiting a single, new technology. This proportion steadily decreased over the twentieth century, and currently stands at about 12%.
   [E] In this combinatorial era, invention seems to have conformed to a fairly regular law reflecting a balance between exploitation of existing ideas and exploration for new ones.
   [F] Before about 1700, humans had lived in pretty much the same way for many thousands of years. Then, abruptly, the transformation of the industrial revolution arrived, bringing waves of change through science and technology.
   [G] This is all speculation, of course, as no one can truly see into the future. But it is possible to look back at data about the history of technologies, and of the inventions to which they gave rise, and to chart the pace of innovation over time.
【R5】
选项
答案C
解析 本空位于最后一段的开头，可能需填入概括性较强的内容。空格前一段讲述专利总量、独特代码专利以及组合代码专利这三项的数量变化情况：1790-1870之间这三者的都呈指数增长，而从1870以后，独特技术代码的增长开始下降，比其它两者的增长慢。空格后指出从1870年起，发明的过程几乎全是_由拼凑在一起的现有技术推动的。本处空格前后的内容相对应，讲的均是1870之后的情况，不同的是空格后的内容较为概括。空格前第六段的讲述则比较具体，可见空格处应该与第六段关系比较密切，有可能是对第六段的概括。从语义上看，C指出发明的本质发生变化，很好地概括了第六段描述的变化情况，且与空格后的内容一起。概括了上文。C中的putting old technologies together in new ways与第六段开头的combinatorial innovation相对应，也与空格后的combining existing technologies的表述相符。故确定C为答案。
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