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  3. It’s no secret that the job of a political pollster is getting harder and harder every election cycle. People are cutting the la

It’s no secret that the job of a political pollster is getting harder and harder every election cycle. People are cutting the la

admin2015-09-30  30
问题     It’s no secret that the job of a political pollster is getting harder and harder every election cycle. People are cutting the landline, and regulations make it incredibly hard for pollsters to reach voters on their cell phones. Mass onslaughts of getoutthe-vote phone calls near Election Day swamp phone lines and make voters recoil from the idea of actually picking up the phone. Finding voters who are willing to talk about their attitudes and beliefs on politics over the phone is an increasingly difficult challenge. It’s hard out there for a pollster these days.
    Advances in computing allow us to analyze huge quantities of unstructured data(think "my random 140 character musings" instead of "my clear answer to a yes or no question"). Culturally, people are more and more comfortable putting it all out there online, from their tastes in music to their political preferences. Not to mention, samples can be enormous, dwarfing the "small data" samples of a pollster who interviews a thousand registered voters. Technological innovation and a cultural shift toward sharing(and oversharing)make it possible for researchers to assess what people think without having to go to the trouble of actually asking questions.
    Or do they? This week, the Few Research Center is out with a study throwing cold water on the idea that analyzing data from sources like Twitter can be an accurate substitute fur more traditional research methods. They find that Tweets are inconsistent in how they match up with polling data. Twitter users were more excited than American voters as a whole about the re-election of Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Pew finds that Twitter users were less excited about Obama ’ s inaugural address than their poll respondents.
    If the challenges facing more traditional "small data" pollsters are actually pretty big. the challenges facing "big data" analysts are huge in this area. It seems obvious that the demographics of the universe of "people Tweeting about the inaugural address" might be different from the universe of "registered voters nationwide. " While traditional pollsters can get a sense of the race, age, and gender of their samples and make corrections accordingly, it’s a lot harder to know all the demographic data behind the Tweets being analyzed. Not to mention, it’s much less clear what counts as a "positive" or "negative" Tweet in any given context, and that this up-or-down-vote approach to sentiment analysis might be too blunt an instrument to be useful.
    As technology moves forward, so too must the way people gather information about public opinion. But don’t count the "small data" polls out quite yet. While some high-profile misses by political pollsters raised important questions about how accurate election polls really are, quite a few pollsters managed to get it very close to right, even given all the aforementioned challenges pollsters face these days. Both "big data" analysis of online conversations and "small data" surveys and focus groups have a role to play in politics, and smart campaigns will value both as complementary methods of learning about where voters stand.
Which one of the following statements is TRUE of the traditional "small data" polls?
选项 A、Traditional pollsters don’t actually asking questions.
B、Traditional pollsters can gel a sense of the race, age, and gender of their samples and make corrections accordingly.
C、Traditional "small data" polls is a better method than "big data" analysis of online conversations.
D、Traditional "small data" polls made more high-profile misses than "big data" polls.
答案B
解析 第二段最后说技术创新和文化上倾向于分享(以及过度分享)的转变使调研者们不必惹麻烦上身，不必实际去问问题，就可以评估人们的想法。这讲的是现在的情况．说的是现在的民调员不必实际去问问题，对应的可以知道，传统的民调员们是实际问问题的．这在文章第一段关于民调员给投票者打电话的传统做法中也可以看出，他们是要实际问问题的．因此A错误。第五段在关于传统民意调查与微博时代民意调查在人口统计数据方面的不同的时候明确指出，传统民调员可以对他们样本的种族，年龄以及性别有所了解。并相应作出改正。因此B正确。文章指出“大数据”网络对话分析存在着自身的不足之处，无法替代传统“小数据”民调．后者也有自身的优越之处，但并不是说“小数据”民调就比“大数据”网络对话分析更好，因此C错误。最后一段提到一些政治民调员所犯的一些引人关注的失误激起了人们对于选举民意调查实际准确性的严重质疑，并没有说这些失误更多的是哪种方法造成的．而且，根据全文的意思来看，反而是传统的“小数据”民意调查更贴近真实结果，失误反而更少，因此D错误。
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