Ielts reading question-type based tests true false not given matching headings

Welcome to Mr Aslanov’s Lessons 
QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS 
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magnetic needle. Rheto-ric about the sufficiency of rational method was so much hot air. Indeed, as 
Medawar insisted, “There is no such thing as The Scientific Method,” no way at all of systematis-ing the 
process of discovery. Really important discoveries had a way of showing up when they had a mind to do so 
and not when you were looking for them. Maybe some scientists, like some book collectors, had a happy 
knack; maybe serendipity described the situation rather than a personal skill or capacity. 
 
E 
Some scientists using the word meant to stress those accidents belonging to the situation; some treated 
serendipity as a personal capacity; many others exploited the ambiguity of the notion. Yet what Cannon and 
Medawar took as a benign nose-thumbing at Dreams of Method, other scientists found incendiary. To say 
that science had a significant serendipitous aspect was taken by some as dangerous denigration. If scientific 
discovery were really accidental, then what was the special basis of expert authority? In this connection, the 
aphorism of choice came from no less an authority on scientific discovery than Louis Pasteur: “Chance 
favors the prepared mind.” Accidents may happen, and things may turn up unplanned and unforeseen, as one 
is looking for something else, but the ability to notice such events, to see their potential bearing and 
meaning, to exploit their occurrence and make constructive use of them—these are the results of systematic 
mental preparation. What seems like an accident is just another form of expertise. On closer inspection, it is 
insisted, accident dissolves into sagacity. 
 
F. 
The context in which scientific serendipity was most contested and had its greatest resonance was that 
connected with the idea of planned science. The serendipitists were not all inhabitants of academic ivory 
towers. As Merton and Barber note, two of the great early-20th-century American pioneers of industrial 
research—Willis Whitney and Irving Langmuir, both of General Electric—made much play of serendipity, 
in the course of arguing against overly rigid research planning. Langmuir thought that misconceptions about 
the certainty and rationality of the research process did much harm and that a mature acceptance of 
uncertainty was far more likely to result in productive research policies. For his own part, Langmuir said 
that satisfactory outcomes “occurred as though we were just drifting with the wind. These things came 
about by accident.” If there is no very determinate relationship between cause and effect in research, he said, 
“then planning does not get us very far.” So, from within the bowels of corporate capitalism came powerful 
arguments, by way of serendipity, for scientific spontaneity and autonomy. The notion that industry was 
invariably committed to the regimentation of scientific research just doesn’t wash. 
G. 
For Merton himself—who one supposes must have been the senior authorserendipity rep-resented the 
keystone in the arch of his social scientific work. In 1936, as a very young man, Merton wrote a seminal 
essay on “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.” It is, he argued, the nature of social 
action that what one intends is rarely what one gets: Intending to provide resources for buttressing Christian 
religion, the natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork for secularism; people 
wanting to be alone with nature in Yosemite Valley wind up crowding one another. We just don’t know 
enough—and we can never know enough to ensure that the past is an adequate guide to the future: 
Uncertainty about outcomes, even of our best-laid plans, is endemic. All social action, including that 
undertaken with the best evidence and formulated according to the most rational criteria, is uncertain in its 
consequences.