English Test 56
Directions for Questions from 1 to 3:
The passage given below is followed by a question. Choose the most appropriate answer to question
The difficulties historians face in establishing cause-and-effect relations in the history of human societies are broadly similar to the difficulties facing
astronomers, climatologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, geologists, and palaeontologists. To varying degrees each of these fields is plagued
by the impossibility of performing replicated, controlled experimental interventions, the complexity arising from enormous numbers of variables, the
resulting uniqueness of each system, the consequent impossibility of formulating universal laws, and the difficulties of predicting emergent
properties and future behaviour. Prediction in history, as in other historical sciences, is most feasible on large spatial scales and over long times,
when the unique features of millions of small-scale brief events become averaged out. Just as I could predict the sex ratio of the next 1,000
newborns but not the sexes of my own two children, the historian can recognize factors that made inevitable the broad outcome of the collision
between American and Eurasian societies after 13,000 years of separate developments, but not the outcome of the 1960 U.S. presidential election.
The details of which candidate said what during a single televised debate in October 1960 Could have given the electoral victory to Nixon instead of
to Kennedy, but no details of who said what could have blocked the European conquest of Native Americans.
How can students of human history profit from the experience of scientists in other historical sciences? A methodology that has proved useful
involves the comparative method and so-called natural experiments. While neither astronomers studying galaxy formation nor human historians can
manipulate their systems in controlled laboratory experiments, they both can take advantage of natural experiments, by comparing systems
differing in the presen