《托福阅读模拟题(三)》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《托福阅读模拟题(三)（2页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、托福阅读模拟题（三）文章出处：学生大考试站 发布时间：2006-4-28 Question 21-30 There were two widely divergent influences on the early development of statistical methods. Statistics had a mother who was dedicated to keeping orderly records of governmental units (state and statistics come from the same Latin root, status) and
2、a gentlemanly gambling father who relied on mathematics to increase his skill at playing the odds in games of chance. The influence of the mother on the offspring, statistics, is represented by counting, measuring, describing, tabulating, ordering. and the taking of censuses all of which led to mode
3、rn descriptive statistics. From the influence of the father came modern inferential statistics, which is based squarely on theories of probability. Descriptive statistics involves tabulating, depicting, and describing collections of data. These data may be quantitative, such as measures of height, i
4、ntelligence, or grade level - variables that are characterized by an underlying continuum - orthe data may represent qualitative variables, such as sex, college major, or personality type. Large masses of data must generally undergo a process of summarization or reduction before they are comprehensi
5、ble. Descriptive statistics is a tool for describing or summarizing or reducing to comprehensible form the properties of an otherwise unwieldy mass or data. Inferential statistics is a formalized body of methods for solving another class ofproblems that present great difficulties for the unaided hum
6、an mind. This general class of problems characteristically involves attempts to make predictions using a sample of observations. For example, a school superintendent wishes to determine the proportion of children in a large school system who come to school without breakfast, have been vaccinated for
7、 flu, or whatever. Having a little knowledge of statistics, the superintendent would know that it is unnecessary and inefficient to question each child; the proportion for the entire district could be estimated fairly accurately from a sample of as few as l00 children. Thus, the purpose of inferenti
8、al statistics is to predict or estimate characteristics of a population from a knowledge of the characteristics of only a sample of the population. 21. With what is the passage mainly concerned ? (A) The drawbacks of descriptive and inferential statistics (B) Applications of inferential statistics (
9、C) The development and use of statistics (D) How to use descriptive statistics 22. The word “divergent“ in line 1 is closest in meaning to (A) different (B) distributed (C) recorded (D) prominent 23. According to the first paragraph, counting and census-taking arc associated with (A) inferential sta
10、tistics (B) descriptive statistics (C) unknown variables (D) qualitative changes 24. Why does the author mention the “mother“ and “father“ in the first paragraph? (A) To point out that parents can teach their children statistics (B) To introduce inferential statistic (C) To explain that there are different kinds of variables (D) To present the background of statistics in a humorous and understandable way
