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  3. (1) History is riddled with science denial. From Newton’s law of gravitation

(1) History is riddled with science denial. From Newton’s law of gravitation

游客2023-10-21  31
问题     (1) History is riddled with science denial. From Newton’s law of gravitation to Hanaoka Seinshu’s use of anesthesia, there’s no shortage of discoveries that have been scoffed at, ridiculed, and wholly rejected by prominent thinkers before eventually settling into the human narrative. But too often, significant damage is done—and sometimes lives are lost—while these debates play out. After centuries of dismissing scientific discoveries, only to be proven wrong time and again, you’d think we’d learn to have a little more faith in the experts.
    (2) In the era of social media, around-the-clock cable news, and Donald Trump, preventing the spread of misinformation has become one of the greatest challenges facing the scientific community. That’s especially true when it comes to politics. On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, science journalist and author Dave Levitan calls out some of Washington’s worst offenders.
    (3) Levitan has spent countless hours pouring over statements made by politicians about science. Sometimes our leaders get the facts right. But frequently, says Levitan, they distort, misrepresent, or fabricate the data in order to pander to their audience or push an agenda. That’s the subject of Levitan’s forthcoming book, Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science.
    (4) While misleading rhetoric is nothing new in politics, the danger it poses to environmental and public health may be at an all-time high. In a country where scientific literacy is already in decline, misinformation about topics as significant as climate change or infectious diseases can have devastating consequences. Yet many politicians, purposely or not, continue to get the science wrong. Levitan points to Sen. James Inhofe as an example of the perfect "denier-in-chief." Last year, Inhofe brought a snowball to the Senate floor to dispute the science of global warming. His implication: Because there was snow on the ground, the Earth couldn’t possibly be getting warmer. It was a classic display of a cherry-picking politician using a single data point to obscure an indisputable trend.
    (5) Two years ago, as Sen. Rand Paul was gearing up to run for president, he slammed the National Institutes of Health for funding research on fruit flies. "Have you seen what the NIH spends money on?" Paul said, according to the Washington Post. "Nine hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars spent to discover whether or not male fruit flies would like to consort with younger female fruit flies." When you put it like that, the NIH sounds ridiculous. But Paul missed the mark completely. As Levitan wrote at the time:
    (6) The characterization of the project as simply testing "whether male fruit flies like younger female fruit flies" is misleading. The study was in fact part of ongoing work looking into olfaction and other sensory perception, the aging process and how it relates to sexual and social activity. A paper that came out of the same line of inquiry appeared in the prestigious journal Science in 2013, showing that exposure to female pheromones without the opportunity to mate actually decreased male flies’ life spans. In short, sexual reward "specifically promoted healthy aging, " according to Scott Pletcher (the scientist whose research Paul was criticizing). "His lab’s work could yield insights both into how humans age and into aging-related diseases… Paul is entitled to his opinions on where government funds are best spent, but the study of flies has yielded important benefits to human health."
    (7) Misrepresenting research is "a way to get people to not want the government to spend money, " Levitan says. "The effect, though, is that people don’t understand the importance of basic science research."
    (8) Of course, scientists share the burden of communicating their findings clearly, but most of them don’t have the public megaphones that elected officials do. "Politicians have a lot of responsibility, " Levitan says. "They’re the ones legislating and governing where money goes and what science actually can get done. Some random scientist can’t just decide he’s going to give a speech and everyone will watch."
    (9) In the end, Levitan offers voters a simple way to sift through the BS: Have a healthy degree of skepticism when politicians talk about science. "If they’re making fun of basic research, " he says, "they’re probably wrong." And his advice to the politicians; Let the scientific consensus be your talking point. (本文选自 Newsweek) [br] The author cited the content from Levitan’s book to________.
选项 A、demonstrate that Sen. Rand Paul misunderstood the research on fruit flies
B、explain the science background of the mentioned study
C、improve the scientific literacy of the readers
D、confirm the significance of scientific research
答案 A
解析 推断题。作者在第六段引用了莱文坦著作中的内容。在之前的一段中，作者提到参议员兰特.保罗抨击了一项关于果蝇的研究，将这项研究说成是测试雄性果蝇是否喜欢更年轻的雌性果蝇，因此让国家拨款给这样的研究显得滑稽可笑，莱文坦著作中的这段文字具体说明了这个研究的实际目的和意义，证明了参议员兰特.保罗的理解严重错误，故A为正确答案。作者引用莱文坦书中的内容显然是为了驳斥参议员兰特.保罗之前的观点，因此该段的作用不是解说背景或讲解科学道理，故排除B；引用莱文坦书中的内容不是为了提升读者的科学认知水平，故排除C；此处是考查作者引用莱文坦书中内容的目的，而不是考查莱文坦书中内容的意义，故排除D。
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