公共英语五级阅读的精读材料

公共英语五级阅读的精读材料

　　Passage Seven (Forecasting of Statistics)

　　Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus become 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 manager 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 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 high-falutin mathematical system 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 ne

【公共英语五级阅读的精读材料】相关文章：

公共英语四级pets阅读精选练习08-19

2023年公共英语4阅读强化训练11-02

公共英语等级考试三级阅读试题及答案04-16

2023年公共英语四级阅读强化辅导11-02

全国公共英语三级阅读考试经典试题12-24

全国公共英语一级考试阅读精选试题及解析04-23

公共英语三级阅读文章《植物学》11-11

2023年公共英语四级阅读考试训练题10-30

公共英语三级考试阅读辅导练习题08-21

最新公共英语二级考试阅读模考试题07-18