单选题
Calculating Crime

When you think about math, you probably don"t think about breaking the law, solving mysteries or finding criminals. But a mathematician in Maryland does, and he has come up with mathematical tools to help police find criminals.
People who solve crimes look for patterns that might reveal (揭示) the identity of the criminal. It"s long been believed, for example, that criminals will break the law closer to where they live, simply because it"s easier to get around in one"s own neighborhood. If police see a pattern of robberies in a certain area, they may look for a suspect who lives near the crime scenes. So, the farther away from the area a crime takes place, the less likely it is that the same criminal did it.
But Mike O"Leary, a mathematician at Towson University in Maryland, says that this kind of approach may be too simple. He says that police may get better clues to the location of an offender"s home base by combining these patterns with a city"s layout and historical crime records.
The records of past crimes contain geographical information and can reveal easy targets—that is, the kind of stores that might be less difficult to rob. Because these stores are along roads, the locations of past crimes contain information about where major streets and intersections (十字路口) are. O"Leary is writing a new computer program that will quickly provide this kind of information for a given city. His program also includes information about the people who live in the city, and information about how a criminal"s patterns change with age. (It"s been shown, for example, that the younger the criminal, the closer to home the crime.)
Other computer programmers have worked on similar software, but O"Leary"s uses more math. The mathematician plans to make his computer program available, free of charge, to police departments around the country.
The program is just one way to use math to fight crime. O"Leary says that criminology—the study of crime and criminals—contains a lot of good math problems. "I feel like I"m in a gold mine and I"m the only one who knows what gold looks like," he says. "It"s a lot of fun."
单选题 Which of the following statements about math is true?
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。由文中第一段可知,很少人用数学来破案,但一个数学家做到了,故选B。
单选题 People tend to think there is a relationship between ______.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。由文中第二段内容可知人们倾向于认为案件发生地与罪犯的居住地有联系,只有D项符合文意。故选D项。
单选题 O"Leary includes all the following information in writing his program EXCEPT ______.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。由文章的第三、四段可知,文中并未说到Mike O"Leary的程序还包括警察局的位置,故选B项。
单选题 O"Leary"s program is different from other similar software in that ______.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。由文中的第六段第一句话说到Mike O"Leary的程序与其他软件的不同之处在于他更多地运用了数学,故选B。
单选题 It can be inferred from the last paragraph that O"Leary ______.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。从文中最后一段话“O"Leary says that criminology—the study of crime and criminals—contains a lot of good math problems.”可知,他认为犯罪学里包含很多数学方面的问题,选D项正确。