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  3. There were two widely divergent influences on the early development of statistical methods. Statistics had a mother who was dedi

There were two widely divergent influences on the early development of statistical methods. Statistics had a mother who was dedi

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问题     There were two widely divergent influences on the early development of statistical methods. Statistics had a mother who was dedicated to keeping orderly records of governmental units (state and statistics come from the same Latin root, status) and a gentlemanly gambling father who relied on mathematics to increase his skill at playing the odds in games of chance. The influence of the mother on the offspring, statistics, is represented by counting, measuring, describing, tabulating, ordering, and the taking of censuses all of which led to modern descriptive statistics. From the influence of the father came modern inferential statistics, which is based squarely on theories of probability.
    Descriptive statistics involves tabulating, depicting, and describing collections of data. These data may be either quantitative,such as measures of height, intelligence, or grade level variables that are characterized by an underlying continuum-or  the data may represent qualitative variables, such as sex, college major, or personality type. Large masses of data must generally undergo a process of summarization or reducing to comprehensibly form the properties of an otherwise unwieldy mass of data.
    Inferential statistics is a formalized body of methods for solving another class of problems that present great difficulties for the unaided human mind. This general class of problems characteristically involves attempts to make predictions using a sample of observations. For example, a school superintendent wishes to determine the proportion of children in a large school system who come to school without breakfast, have been vaccinated for flu, or whatever. Having a little knowledge of statistics, the superintendent would know that it is unnecessary and inefficiency to question each child; the proportion for the entire district could be estimated fairly accurately from a sample of as few as 100 children. Thus, the purpose of inferential statistics is to predict or estimate characteristics of a population from a knowledge of the characteristics of only a sample of the population.
The word "unwieldy" in the second paragraph is closest in meaning to ______.
选项 A、difficult to collect
B、difficult to tackle
C、incomprehensive
D、uncontrollable
答案B
解析 第二段最后一句话“Large masses of data…the properties of an otherwise unwieldy mass of data．”的意思是说，大量的数据群必须要有一个总结或减收的过程，为了从可能是乱七八糟的数据群中找出其特征，关键词是otherwise，表示前后有个对比。可见后面提及的unwieldy mass of data是难以处理的数据。再看四个选项：A“难以收集”，文章没有提收集；B“难以处理”，与上下文正好相符；C“不可理解的”，前面说将它们整理成容易理解的形式，可见它们还是“可以理解的”；D“不可控制的”，与句意不符。故选B。
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