hard · Act reading
Passage: Historians of science once treated the laboratory notebook as a transparent window—a faithful record of what the researcher saw and did. Recent scholars have grown skeptical of that view. A notebook, they argue, is not a mirror but an instrument of persuasion: the experimenter decides which trials to log and which to dismiss as 'noise,' which numbers to circle and which to leave un-remarked. By the time a result is written down, it has already been interpreted. This is not to accuse scientists of dishonesty. It is to observe that even the most scrupulous record is shaped by the questions its author thought worth asking—and that what a notebook omits can reveal as much as what it preserves. The author refers to the laboratory notebook as 'an instrument of persuasion' primarily in order to:
- accuse working scientists of deliberately falsifying their experimental records.
- challenge the assumption that a notebook neutrally records what was observed.
- argue that handwritten notebooks should be replaced by automated data logging.
- praise older historians for their faith in the objectivity of scientific records.
Sign up free to see the explanation and track your rank →
More Act reading practice
- What is the main idea of the paragraph?
- Which of the following is the central point of the paragraph?
- Which choice best summarizes the main idea of the passage?
- What date was written on the map ?
- He had promised to light the signal lantern by dusk, but the fuel tin in the shed was near
- Critics of the new urban-greening initiative argued that planting trees along commercial c
- Read the following passage, then answer the question. When the lighthouse keeper retired a
- Read the following passage, then answer the question. The octopus is among the ocean's mos