这篇文章较难理解,同学们应该照我下列的三层思路疏通该文:
1.这篇文章的第一段是总论,指出科学与其它社会文化之间的矛盾很严峻。
2.第234段描述科学家们反击其它部门,斥之为反科学(antiscience)。
3.第567段则指出科学家们的树敌范围过宽,按文末哈佛一学者的话说,“所有那些烦扰或威胁那些自以为更开明的人(指科学家)的人”都会被贴上反科学的帽子。
接着再去思考末尾的问题Q62,答案选哪个?
Passage3
Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gallileo’s17th-century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church of poet William Blake’s harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has,if anything,deepened in this century.
Until recently,the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics but no longer. As funding for science has declined,scientists have attacked “antiscience” in several books,notably Higher Superstition,by Paul R.Gross,a biologist at the University of Virginia,and Norman Levitt,a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon-Haunted World,by Car Sagan of Cornell University.
Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as “The Flight from Science and Reason,”held in New York City in1995,and “Science in the Age of(Mis)information,”which assembled last June near Buffalo.
Antiscience clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists,philosophers and other academics who have questioned science’s objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts,creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.
A survey of news stories in1996reveals that the antiscience tag has been attached to many other groups as well,from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.
Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber,whose manifesto,published in1995,scorns science and longs for return to a pretechnological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience,as an essay in US News & World Report last May seemed to suggest.
The environmentalists,inevitably,respond to such critics. The true enemies of science,argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University,a pioneer of environmental studies,are those who question the evidence supporting global warming,the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth. Indeed,some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. “The term ‘antiscience’ can lump together too many,quite different things,”notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his1993work Science and Anti-Science. “They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened.”
62.The author’s attitude toward the issue of “science vs. antiscience” is .
A. impartial B. subjective C. biased D. puzzling
这道题涉及作者对“科学pk其它文化”这个矛盾的态度。从第一段的开头就能看出,作者只是以局外人的姿态,指出两者之间的矛盾严峻,作者应该是中立态度;再者,根据上面对文章主题两层语义的分析,作者既指出科学家的反击,也指出他们的过火,换言之,作者的讨论是很辨证的,是客观中立的。综合起来,答案选A“中立的”。
能接受吗?同学们要学会正确地分析文章的主旨和作者的倾向,从而把题目作对。