Question 12

Read the following sentences and choose the option that best arranges them in a logical order.
1. As chroniclers of an incremental process, they discover that additional research makes it harder, not easier, to answer questions like: When was oxygen discovered? Who first conceived of energy conservation?
2. Simultaneously, these same historians confront growing difficulties in distinguishing the "scientific" component of past observation and belief from what their predecessors had readily labeled "error" and "superstition."
3. Increasingly, a few of them suspect that these are simply the wrong sorts of questions to ask. Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions.
4. In recent years, however, a few historians of science have been finding it more and more difficult to fulfill the functions that the concept of development-by-accumulation assigns to them.

Solution

1-3 forms a logical pair as the questions mentioned in 3 are given in 1. Thus, options B, C and D are eliminated.

Among 4 and 2, 4 is a better opening statement as it introduces the problem faced by the historians of science.

Hence, the answer is option E.


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