单选题

Difficult to Have Hard Discoveries

If there is one thing scientists have to hear, it is that the game is over. Raised on the belief of an endless voyage of discovery, they recoil (畏缩) from the suggestion that most of the best things have already been located. If they have, today"s scientists can hope to contribute no more than a few grace notes to the symphony of science.
A book to be published in Britain this week, The End of Science , argues persuasively that this is the case. Its author, John Horgan, is a senior writer for Scientific American magazine , who has interviewed many of today"s leading scientists and science philosophers. The shock of realizing that science might be over came to him, he says, when he was talking to Oxford mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose.
The End of Science provoked a wave of denunciation (谴责) in the United States last year. "The reaction has been one of complete shock and disbelief," Mr. Horgan says.
The real question is whether any remaining unsolved problems, of which there are plenty, lend themselves to universal solutions. If they do not, then the focus of scientific discovery is already narrowing. Since the triumphs of the 1960s—the genetic code, plate tectonics (板块构造学说), and the microwave background radiation that went a long way towards proving the Big Bang —genuine scientific revolutions have been scarce. More scientists are now alive, spending more money on research, than ever. Yet most of the great discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries were made before the appearance of state sponsorship, when the scientific enterprise was a fraction of its present size.
Were the scientists who made these discoveries brighter than today"s? That seems unlikely. A far more reasonable explanation is that fundamental science has already entered a period of diminished returns. "Look, don"t get me wrong," says Mr. Horgan. "There are lots of important things still to study, and applied science and engineering can go on forever. I hope we get a cure for cancer, and for mental disease, though there are few real signs of progress."

单选题 The sentence "most of the best things have already been located" could mean ______.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[解析] 由文章第一段第二句话“Raised on the belief of an endless voyage of discovery, they recoil (畏缩) from the suggestion that most of the best things have already been located.”可知，科学家们在科研工作中，怀着不断发现、不断探索的信念，他们最害怕听到这样的观点——世界上大多数最好的东西都已经被发现了，即世界上大多数以前不为人类所知的秘密都已经被发现了。故选D。

单选题 John Horgan ______.

单选题 There have not been many genuine scientific revolutions in the past few decades because ______.

单选题 The term "the Big Bang" in the fourth paragraph probably refers to ______.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】[解析] 由题干中的“the Big Bang(大爆炸)”定位到文章第四段第三句话，可知，the genetic code(基因密码), plate tectonics (板块构造学说), and the microwave background radiation(微波背景辐射)都属于“the Big Bang(大爆炸)”理论的一部分。而基因密码理论、板块构造学说和微波背景辐射理论都与宇宙起源密切相关，由此，我们推断出，这里的“the Big Bang(大爆炸)”指的是宇宙起源理论。故选C。