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  3. Why in an age of advanced technology, should so many people still cling to an ancient belief? In part it must be because astrolo

Why in an age of advanced technology, should so many people still cling to an ancient belief? In part it must be because astrolo

admin2010-12-04  104
问题       Why in an age of advanced technology, should so many people still cling to an ancient belief? In part it must be because astrology--claims to tell us something about ourselves, and all of us are interested in ourselves. I think it is because astrology is presented as if it were a science by its modern practitioner, and many people are misled by this.
      In fact, astrology was never a science. It was not a hypothesis or theory developed to describe natural phenomena, and until fairly recent times, there was not attempt to test or verify its predictions. Astrology began approximately three thousand years ago in Babylonia; it was applied to monarchs and kingdoms, but not to individuals. It spread in the 6th century BC as far as India, where it flourishes today. The Egyptians, meanwhile, developed their own kind of astrology. But the astrology now practiced in Europe and America is that developed by the Greeks, who synthesized the ideas of the Babylonians and Egyptians and enriched them with concepts from their own fertile imaginations. The Greeks believed that the earth was composed of four elements, and the heavens of a perfect crystalline material. The planets themselves were variously thought to be gods, residences of gods, or at least manifestations of gods. The gods were immortal, but otherwise had the same attributes of anger, happiness, jealousy, rage and pleasure as we do. Now if what the gods’ thought was capricious (变化无常的), at least the planets were predictable in their movements. Because our own lot in life is so unpredictable, it must be purely at the mercy of gods. But if the gods are the planets, or somehow associated with them, then we have only to learn the rules of the motions of the planets to understand the whims of the gods and how they shape our own lives. So the belief developed that each of our lives is preordained by the precise configuration of the planets in the sky at the time of our birth.
       Astrology could not, of course, have seemed as incredible to the ancients as it does to us. The role of the sun influencing our daily and yearly lives is obvious; it was a natural extension to attribute other powers to the other planets as well. It wasn’t until the time of Newton that we understood that the laws of Nature apply to the celestial worlds as well as to the terrestrial one. During antiquity, however, all great scholars believed in astrology.   
It is implied that astrology is based on the belief that______.
选项 A、the gods’ intentions were hard to predict
B、the fate of our lives are unpredictable
C、the gods are closely related to the planets
D、the gods have the same attributes as we do
答案C
解析 第2段主要描述占星术的由来，该段末句开头的the belief指的就是占星术，而它前面的so表明之前的句子说的就是占星术的来源，总结这些句子可以看出，占星术之所以发展起来，主要是因为人们相信众神与星辰有关，预测了星辰的活动就能知道众神的旨意，C与此意最相近。
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