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  3. Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their

Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their

游客2023-12-19  8
问题    Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance, were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers using non-scientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been non-verbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details of our material surroundings.
   Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them. The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of nonverbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber? Where should the valves be placed? Should it have a long or short piston? Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, bat the nonscientific component of design remains primary.
   Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail "hard thinking," nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
   Its courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations; they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics. (447) [br] Which of the following statements would best serve as an introduction to the passage?
选项 A、The assumption that the knowledge incorporated in technological developments must be derived from science ignores the many non-scientific decisions made by technologists.
B、Analytical thought is no longer a vital component, in the success of technological development.
C、As knowledge of technology has increased, the tendency has been to lose sight of the important role played by scientific thought in making decisions about form, arrangement, and texture.
D、A technologist thinking about a machine, reasoning through the successive steps in a dynamic process, can actually turn the machine over mentally.
答案 A
解析 推理判断题。作者并非一开篇就提出nonverbal thinking这一概念的，而是先对科学的和非科学的思维方式进行了区分，再由后者引出本文主要讨论的问题。因此，作为本文的引子，从连贯性上考虑，应与科学/非科学这一对概念相关。
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