试题出自试卷《北京大学2013年考博英语真题》

Ironically, the intellectual tools currently being used by the political right to such harmful effect originated on the academic left. In the 1960s and 1970s a philosophical movement called postmodernism developed among humanities professors （1） being deposed by science, which they regarded as right- leaning. Postmodernism （2） ideas from cultural anthropology and relativity theory to argue that truth is （3）and subject to the assumptions and prejudices of the observer. Science is just one of many ways of knowing, they argued, neither more nor less （4） than others, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or women. （5） ，they defined science as the way of knowing among Western white men and a tool of cultural （6） .This argument （7）with many feminists and civil-rights activists and became widely adopted, leading to the “political correctness” justifiably（8） by Rush Limbaugh and the “mental masturbation” lampooned by Woody Allen.
Acceptance of this relativistic worldview （9） democracy and leads not to tolerance but to authoritarianism. John Locke, one of Jefferson’s “trinity of three greatest men,” showed （10） almost three centuries ago. Locke watched the arguing factions of Protestantism, each claiming to be the one true religion, and asked: How do we know something to be true? What is the basis of knowledge? In 1689 he （11）what knowledge is and how it is grounded in observations of the physical world in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Any claim that fails this test is “but faith, or opinion, but not knowledge.” It was this idea — that the world is knowable and that objective, empirical knowledge is the most （12）basis for public policy that stood as Jefferson’s foundational argument for democracy.
By falsely （13） knowledge with opinion, postmodernists and antiscience conservatives alike collapse our thinking back to a pre-Enlightenment era, leaving no common basis for public policy. Public discourse is （14）to endless waning opinions, none seen as more valid than another. Policy is determined by the loudest voices, reducing us to a world in which might（15） right — the definition of authoritarianism.