2019考研英语一翻译真题来源和基本分析
2018-12-22 19:03阅读：
2019考研英语一翻译解析
新东方
唐静
文章来源于英国著名杂志《旁观者》The
Spectator，原文标题是Why is so much bad
science published?文章作者Theodore
Dalrymple，大约发表时间是2016年。文章经命题人改编过，与2014年到2018年的这几年，试题难度稳中有升。
试题原文和划线句如下：
It wasn’t until after my retirement that I had the time to
read scientific papers in medical journals with anything like close
attention. Until then, I had, like most doctors, read the authors’
conclusions and assumed that they bore some necessary relation to
what had gone before. I had also naively assumed that the editors
had done their job and checked the intellectual coherence and
probity of the contents of their journals.
It was only after I started to write a weekly col
umn about the medical journals, and began to read scientific papers
from beginning to end, that I realised just how bad — inaccurate,
misleading, sloppy, illogical — much of the medical literature,
even in the best journals, frequently was. My discovery pleased and
reassured me in a way: for it showed me that, even in advancing
age, I was still capable of being surprised.
I came to recognise various signs of a bad paper: the kind of
paper that purports to show that people who eat more than one kilo
of broccoli a week were 1.17 times more likely than those who eat
less to suffer late in life from pernicious anaemia. 46)
There is a great deal of this kind of nonsense in the
medical journals which, when taken up by broadcasters and the lay
press, generates both health scares and short-lived dietary
enthusiasms.
Why is so much bad science published?
A recent paper, titled ‘The Natural Selection of Bad
Science’, published on the Royal Society’s
open
science website, attempts to answer this intriguing and
important question.
According to the authors, the problem is not merely that
people do bad science, as they have always done, but that our
current system of career advancement positively encourages it. They
quote an anonymous researcher who said pithily: ‘Poor methods get
results.’ What is important is not truth, let alone importance, but
publication, which has become almost an end in itself. There has
been a kind of inflationary process at work: 47) nowadays
anyone applying for a research post has to have published twice the
number of papers that would have been required for the same post
only 10 years ago. Never mind the quality, then, count
the number. It is at least an objective measure.
In addition to the pressure to publish, there is a preference
in journals for positive rather than negative results. To prove
that factor a
has no effect whatever on
outcome b
may be important in the
sense that it refutes a hypothesis, but it is not half so
captivating as that factor
a
has some marginally positive
statistical association with outcome
b. It may be
an elementary principle of statistics that association is not
causation, but in practice everyone forgets it.
The easiest way to generate positive associations is to do
bad science, for example by trawling through a whole lot of data
without a prior hypothesis. For example, if you took 100 dietary
factors and tried to associate them with flat feet, you would find
some of them that were associated with that condition, associations
so strong that at first sight they would appear not to have arisen
by chance.
Once it has been shown that the consumption of, shall we say,
red cabbage is associated with flat feet, one of two things can
happen: someone will try to reproduce the result, or no one will,
in which case it will enter scientific mythology. The penalties for
having published results which are not reproducible, and prove
before long to be misleading, usually do not cancel out the
prestige of having published them in the first place: and therefore
it is better, from the career point of view, to publish junk than
to publish nothing at all. A long list of publications, all of them
valueless, is always impressive.
48)Attempts have been made to (control this
inflation命题人改编为curb this
kind tendency),（for example
by trying, when it comes to career
advancement这部分被出题人删除）, to
incorporate some measure of quality as well as quantity into the
assessment of an applicant’s published papers.
This is the famed citation index, that is to say the number of
times a paper has been quoted elsewhere in the scientific
literature, the assumption being that an important paper will be
cited more often than one of small account. 49) This
would be reasonable enough if it were not for the fact that
scientists can easily arrange to cite themselves in their future
publications, or get associates to do so for them in return for
similar favours.
（这部分原文我大量删除，具体待整理）
Boiling down an individual’s output to simple, objective
metrics, such as number of publications or journal impacts, entails
considerable savings in time, energy and ambiguity. Unfortunately,
the long-term costs of using simple quantitative metrics to assess
researcher merit are likely to be quite great.
50) If we are serious about ensuring that our
science is both meaningful and reproducible, we must ensure that
our institutions incentivise that kind of science.
In other words, what we need is more emphasis on personal
contact and even nepotism in the way careers are advanced: but tell
it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the
daughters of the Philistines rejoice…
