【正文】 st that scientists had been able to look into the past, for what they were seeing were the patterns and structures that existed 15 billion years ago. That was just about the moment that the universe was born. What the researchers found was at once both amazing and expected。s greatest glory was that in 1609 he was the first person to turn the newly invented telescope on the heavens to prove that the plas revolve around the sun rather than around the Earth. But the real hero of the story, according to the new school of scientists, was the long evolution in the improvement of machinery for making eyeglasses. Federal policy is necessarily involved in the technology vs. genius dispute. 75) Whether the Government should increase the financing of pure science at the expense of technology or vice versa often depends on the issue of which is seen as the driving force. 新東方在線 [] 網(wǎng)絡課堂電子教材系列 英譯漢、完型與詞匯分冊 2 Passage 2 The standardized educational or psychological tests that are widely used to aid in selecting, classifying, assigning, or promoting students, employees, and military personnel have been the target of recent attacks in books, magazines, the daily press, and even in congress. 71) The target is wrong, for in attacking the tests, critics divert attention from the fault that lies with illinformed or inpetent users. The tests themselves are merely tools, with characteristics that can be measured with reasonable precision under specified conditions. Whether the results will be valuable, meaningless, or even misleading depends partly upon the tool itself but largely upon the user. All informed predictions of future performance are based upon some knowledge of relevant past performance: school grades research productive, sales records, or whatever is appropriate. 72) How well the predictions will be validated by later performance depends upon the amount, reliability, and appropriateness of the information used and on the skill and wisdom with which it is interpreted. Anyone who keeps careful score knows that the information available is always inplete and that the predictions are always subject to error. Standardized tests should be considered in this context. They provide a quick, objective method of getting some kids of information about what a person learned, the skills he has developed, or the kinds of person he is. The information so obtained has, qualitatively, the same advantages and shortings as other kinds of information. 73) Whether to use tests, other kinds of information, or both in a particular situation depends, therefore, upon the evidence from experience concerning parative validity and upon such factors as cost and availability. 74) In general, the tests work most effectively when the qualities to be measured can be most precisely defined and least effectively when what is to be measured or predicted can not be well defined. Properly used, they provide a rapid means of getting parable information about many people. Sometimes they identify students whose high potential has not been previously recognized, but there are many things they do not do. 75. For example, they do not pensate for gross social inequality, and thus do not tell how able an underprivileged youngster might have been had he grown up under more favorable circumstances. 新東方在線 [] 網(wǎng)絡課堂電子教材系列 英譯漢、完型與詞匯分冊 3 Passage3 The differences in relative growth of various areas of scientific research have several causes. 71) Some of these causes are pletely reasonable results of social needs. Others are reasonable consequences of particular advances in science being to some extent selfaccelerating. Some, however, are less reasonable processes of different growth in which preconceptions of the form scientific theory ought to take, by persons in authority, act to alter the growth pattern of different areas. This is a new problem probably not yet unavoidable。t, because it assumes that there is an agreed account of human rights, which is something the world does not have. On one view of rights, to be sure, it necessarily follows that animals have none. 72) Some philosophers argue that rights exist only within a social contract, as part of an exchange of duties and entitlements. Therefore, animals cannot have rights. The idea of punishing a tiger that kills somebody is absurd。t have long to wait. 73) Astrophysicists working with groundbased detectors at the South Pole and balloonborne instruments are closing in on such structures, and may report their findings soon. 74) If the small hot spots look as expected, that will be a triumph for yet another scientific idea, a refinement of the Big Bang called the inflationary universe theory. Inflation says that very early on, the universe expanded in size by more than a trillion trillion trillion trillionfold in much less than a second, propelled by a sort of antigravity. 75) Odd though it sounds, cosmic inflation is a scientifically plausible consequence of some respected ideas in elementaryparticle physics, and many astrophysicists have been convinced for the better part of a decade that it is true. 新東方在線 [] 網(wǎng)絡課堂電子教材系列 英譯漢、完型與詞匯分冊 6 Passage 6 71) While there are almost as many definitions of history as there are historians, modern practice most closely conforms to one that sees history as the attempt to recreate and explain the significant events of the past. Caught in the web of its own tune and place, each generation of historians determines anew what is significant for it in the past. In this search the evidence found is always inplete and scattered。 s futurologist, Ian Pearson, these are among the