(单词翻译:单击)
中英文本
To recognise how statistics have been entangled in notions of national progress, consider the case of GDP. GDP is an estimate of the sum total of a nation's consumer spending, government spending, investments and trade balance (exports minus imports), which is represented in a single number. This is fiendishly difficult to get right, and efforts to calculate this figure began, like so many mathematical techniques, as a matter of marginal, somewhat nerdish interest during the 1930s. It was only elevated to a matter of national political urgency by the second world war, when governments needed to know whether the national population was producing enough to keep up the war effort. In the decades that followed, this single indicator, though never without its critics, took on a hallowed political status, as the ultimate barometer of a government's competence. Whether GDP is rising or falling is now virtually a proxy for whether society is moving forwards or backwards.
想要认识统计数据是如何与国家进步的概念纠缠在一起的,不妨以GDP为例
Or take the example of opinion polling, an early instance of statistical innovation occurring in the private sector. During the 1920s, statisticians developed methods for identifying a representative sample of survey respondents, so as to glean the attitudes of the public as a whole. This breakthrough, which was first seized upon by market researchers, soon led to the birth of the opinion polling. This new industry immediately became the object of public and political fascination, as the media reported on what this new science told us about what "women" or "Americans" or "manual labourers" thought about the world.
再以民意调查为例,民意调查是私营部门统计创新的早期例子
Nowadays, the flaws of polling are endlessly picked apart. But this is partly due to the tremendous hopes that have been invested in polling since its origins. It is only to the extent that we believe in mass democracy that we are so fascinated or concerned by what the public thinks. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of "the public interest" is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.
如今,民意调查的缺陷愈加显露,一定程度上是因为人们从一开始便对投票寄予了厚望
词语解释
1.so as to 以便
How can faculty improve their teaching so as to encourage creativity?
全体教员怎样才能改进教学以便激发创造力?
2.as opposed to 与……截然相反
What made you decide to become a Republican, as opposed to a Democrat?
是什么使你决定成为共和党人,而不是民主党人呢?
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