In science the meaning of the word "explain" suffers with civilization’s every step in search of reality. Science cannot really

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问题     In science the meaning of the word "explain" suffers with civilization’s every step in search of reality. Science cannot really explain electricity, magnetism, and gravitation; their effects can be measured and predicted, but of their nature no more is known to the modern scientist than to Thales who first speculated on the electrification of amber. Most contemporary physicists reject the notion that man can ever discover what these mysterious forces "really" are. Electricity, Bertrand Russell says, "is not a thing, like St. Paul’s Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave. When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to tell. " Until recently scientists would have disapproved of such an idea. Aristotle, for example, whose natural science dominated western thought for two thousand years, believed that man could arrive at an understanding of reality by reasoning from self-evident principles. He felt, for example, that it is a self-evident principle that everything in the universe has its proper place, hence one can deduce that objects fall to the ground because that’s where they belong, and smoke goes up because that’s where it belongs. The goal of Aristotelian science was to explain why things happen. Modern science was born when Galileo began trying to explain how things happen and thus originated the method of controlled experiment which now forms the basis of scientific investigation.
The passage says that until recently scientists disagreed with the idea that______.

选项 A、there are self-evident principles
B、there are mysterious forces in the universe
C、man cannot discover what forces "really" are
D、we can discover why things behave as they do

答案C

解析 文章在中间部分提到“Until recently scientists would have disapproved of such an idea”,这里考查了对not…until句意的理解。比如“She didn’t arrive until 6 o’clock”的意思是,她直到6点才到。因此本句话的意思是:直到最近,科学家们才同意:这样的观点。这里的such an idea指的此句前面Bertrand Russell的观点。文章曾提到Most contemporary physicists reject the notion that man can ever discover what these mysterious forces “really”are,然后引用了Bertrand Russell的话来进一步说明这个观点,所以正确答案是C选项。
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