1999年英语真题5（1 / 2）

Passage 5

Sce, in practice, depends far less on the experiments it prepares than on the preparedness of the minds of the men

who watch the experiments. Sir Isaaewton supposedly discravity through the fall of an apple. Apples had been

falling in many pces for turies and thousands of people had seen them fall. But on for years had been curious

about the cause of the orbital motion of the moon and ps. What kept them in pce? Why didn’t they fall out of the sky?

The fact that the apple fell down toward the earth and not up into the tree answered the question he had been asking himself

about ther fruits of the heavens, the moon and the ps.

How many men would have sidered the possibility of an apple falling up into the tree? on did because he was

n to prediything. He was just w. His mind was ready for the uable. Uability is part of

the essential nature of research. If you don’t have uable things, you don’t have research. Stists tehis

when writing their cut and dried reports for the teical journals, but history is filled with examples of it.

In talking to some stists, particurly younger ones, you might gather the impression that they find the “stific

method” a substitute for imaginative thought. I’ve attended research ferences where a stist has been asked what he

thinks about the advisability of tinuing a certain experiment. The stist has frowned, looked at the graphs, and said,

“the data are still inclusive.” “We know that,” the men from the budget office have said, “but what do you think? Is it

worthwhile going on? What do you think we might expect?” The stist has been shocked at having even been asked to

specute.

What this amounts to, of course, is that the stist has bee the victim of his own writings. He has put forward

uioned cims so sistently that he not only believes them himself, but has vinced industrial and business

ma that they are true. If experiments are pnned and carried out acc to pn as faithfully as the reports in the

sce journals indicate, then it is perfectly logical for ma to expect research to produce results measurable in

dolrs as. It is entirely reasonable for auditors to believe that stists who kly where they are going and

how they will get there should not be distracted by the y of keeping one eye on the cash register while the other eye

is on the microscope. Nor, if regurity and ity to a standard pattern are as desirable to the stist as the writing of

his papers would appear to reflect, is ma to be bmed for discriminating against the “odd balls” among researchers

in favor of more ventional thinkers who “work well with the team”.

27. The author wants to prove with the example of Isaaewton that.