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  3. Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus became part of the greatest story ever told. Man

Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus became part of the greatest story ever told. Man

admin2011-04-26  57
问题     Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus became part of the greatest story ever told. Many things have changed in the intervening years. The hotel industry worries more about overbuilding than overcrowding, and if they had to meet an unexpected influx, few inns would have a manger to accommodate the weary guests. Now it is the census taker that does the traveling in the fond hope that a highly mobile population will stay put long enough to get a good sampling. Methods of gathering, recording, and evaluating information have presumably been improved a great deal. And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to obtain a simple head count as an adequate basis for levying taxes, now batteries of complicated statistical series furnished by governmental agencies and private organizations are eagerly scanned and interpreted by sages and seers to get a clue to future events. The Bible does not tell us how the Roman census takers made out, and as regards our more immediate concern, the reliability of present day economic forecasting, there are considerable differences of opinion. They were aired at the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the American Statistical Association. There was the thought that business forecasting might well be on its way from an art to a science, and some speakers talked about newfangled computers and highfalutin mathematical systems in terms of excitement and endearment which we, at least in our younger years when these things mattered, would have associated more readily with the description of a fair maiden. But others pointed to the deplorable record of highly esteemed forecasts and forecasters with a batting average below that of the Mets, and the President-elect of the Association cautioned that "high powered statistical methods are usually in order where the facts are crude and inadequate, the exact contrary of what crude and inadequate statisticians assume". We left his birthday party somewhere between hope and despair and with the conviction, not really newly acquired, that proper statistical methods applied to ascertainable facts have their merits in economic forecasting as long as neither forecaster nor public is deluded into mistaking the delineation of probabilities and trends for a prediction of certainties of mathematical exactitude.  
The American Statistical Association ______.
选项 A、has an excellent record in business forecasting
B、is converting statistical study from an art to a science
C、speaks with mathematical exactitude
D、is neither hopeful nor pessimistic
答案B
解析 美国统计协会正把统计学由一门艺术转变为一门科学。文中说，圣经并没有告诉我们罗马的人口普查者们是怎样操作的；至于我们最关心的东西——当今经济预测的可靠性，还存在很大的分歧。这些分歧在美国统计协会成立125周年庆祝会上得以公开。有人认为商业预报正由艺术迈向科学。
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