II. Passage: Fill in the blanks 10%
The “two-cultures” controversy of several decades back has quieted down some, but it is still with
us, still unsettled because of the 21 views set out by C.P. Snow at one polemical extreme and by
F.R. Leavis at the other; these remain as the two sides of the argument. At one edge, the humanists are set
~ 2 ~
up as knowing, and wanting to know, very little about science and even less about the human meaning of
contemporary science; they are, so it goes, antiscientific in their 22 . On the other side, the scientists
are served up as a bright but 23 lot, well-read in nothing except science, even, as Leavis said of
Snow, incapable of writing good novels. The humanities are presented in the dispute as though made up
of imagined 24 notions about human behavior, unsubstantiated stories 25 by poets and
novelists, while the sciences deal parsimoniously with lean facts, hard data, 26 theories, truths
established beyond doubt, the unambiguous facts of life.
The argument is shot through with bogus assertions and false images, and I have no intention of
becoming
27 in it here, on one side or the other. Instead, I intend to take a stand in the middle of what seems
to me a
28 , hoping to confuse the argument by showing that there isn’t really any argument in the first place.
To do this, I must try to show that there is in fact a solid middle ground to stand 29 , a shared
common earth beneath the feet of all the humanists and all the scientists, a single underlying view of the
world that drives all scholars, whatever their 30 – whether history or structuralist criticism or
linguistics or quantum chromodynamics or astrophysics or molecular genetics.
(A) cooked up (B) cottoned on (C) discipline (D) entrapped
(E) illiterate (AB) incontrovertible (AC) muddle (AD) polarized
(AE) prejudice (BC) unverifiable (BD) on (BE) with
【題組】27