English Test 52
Directions for Questions from 1 to 3:
The passage given below is followed by a question. Choose the most appropriate answer to question.
To discover the relation between rules, paradigms, and normal science, consider first how the historian isolates the particular loci of commitment
that have been described as accepted rules. Close historical investigation of a given specialty at a given time discloses a set of recurrent and quasi-
standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications. These are the community's paradigms,
revealed in its textbooks, lectures, and laboratory exercises. By studying them and by practicing with them, the members of the corresponding
community learn their trade. The historian, of course, will discover in addition a penumbral area occupied by achievements whose status is still in
doubt, but the core of solved problems and techniques will usually be clear. Despite occasional ambiguities, the paradigms of a mature scientific
community can be determined with relative ease. That demands a second step and one of a somewhat different kind. When undertaking it, the
historian must compare the community's paradigms with each other and with its current research reports. In doing so, his object is to discover what
isolable elements, explicit or implicit, the members of that community may have abstracted from their more global paradigms and deploy it as rules
in their research. Anyone who has attempted to describe or analyze the evolution of a particular scientific tradition will necessarily have sought
accepted principles and rules of this sort. Almost certainly, he will have met with at least partial success. But, if his experience has been at all like
my own, he will have found the search for rules both more difficult and less satisfying than the search for paradigms. Some of the generalizations
he employs to describe the community's shared beliefs will present more problems. Others, however, will seem a shade