b) it is accountable for the significant part of the world's need for oil. c) such wars are disruptive of oil tanker traffic between the gulf states.
d) Iraq and Iran have historical enmity toward each other.
9. In the mid-1980s...................
a) Iraq waged a war against Iran.
b) the U.S. interfered in the Iran-Iraq war with its aircraft.
c) the amount of income the Gulf states gained from oil decreased sharply. d) the war between Iran and Iraq was going on outside the gulf region.
If science has become remote from everyday experience, it has also broken from conventional
notions of discovery. In virtually every cutting-edge field, from astrophysics to molecular
genetics, the object of discovery is frequently totally inaccessible to the senses, and the process
of discovery has become inferential rather than direct. When Wolszczan "discovered" the first
planets outside our own solar system, he did not spy them through a telescope: he inferred their
presence by the pattern of radio beeps coming from the pulsar they orbit. When chemists
"discovered" a substance in broccoli that may prevent cancer, they did not peer at the stalks
through a microscope: they looked for the chemical's footprints in the wavy printout of a
chromatograph. In palaeontology one can still stub a toe and, by God, definitely and directly
discover a fossil. But in other fields, "no one looks at the thing itself anymore," says physicist
Nick Samios, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. "We look at what the
thing does, at the traces it leaves behind."
10. What was conventionally understood from the conception of discovery was
a) the unavailability of the thing discovered.
b) to sense directly the thing discovered.
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c) that the discovered thing was sensed only by instruments.
d) that discoveries were inferential rather than direct.
11. Which of the discoveries below is directly accessible to the senses?
a) The discovery of a new star through a detector.
