Passage A
In 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift, postulating that all of Earth's landmasses were once joined in a single supercontinent, Pangaea, which subsequently broke apart. Wegener marshaled an impressive array of empirical evidence to support his claim. He pointed to the striking jigsaw-puzzle fit of the South American and African coastlines, the continuous geological formations across disparate continents, and, most compellingly, the presence of identical fossilized plants and animals in regions now separated by vast oceans. Despite this wealth of observational data, the geological establishment of the time largely dismissed Wegener's hypothesis. The primary critique was not that his geological and biological observations were flawed, but rather that his proposed mechanism for the movement was physically impossible. Wegener suggested that the continents plowed through the rigid ocean floor under the influence of centrifugal and tidal forces, a proposition that geophysicists quickly demonstrated to be mathematically untenable. Consequently, without a viable physical mechanism to explain how such massive landmasses could move, the scientific community relegated continental drift to the fringes of geological science, treating the compelling empirical evidence as a collection of curious anomalies rather than the foundation of a new structural paradigm.
Passage B
The revolution in the earth sciences during the 1960s, culminating in the theory of plate tectonics, fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the planet's dynamics. This paradigm shift was catalyzed not by a reexamination of continental coastlines or terrestrial fossil records, but by entirely new types of data derived from the ocean floor. The discovery of paleomagnetic striping—symmetrical bands of alternating magnetic polarity on either side of mid-ocean ridges—provided conclusive evidence for seafloor spreading. From this, it became clear that the Earth's lithosphere is divided into distinct, rigid plates that float upon the more ductile asthenosphere beneath them. As new crust is continuously generated at mid-ocean ridges, these plates are pushed apart, carrying the continents along with them. This conceptual breakthrough was crucial; it demonstrated that the continents do not violently plow through the ocean floor, as early theorists had surmised, but rather are passively transported as embedded features within the shifting lithospheric plates. By elucidating the convective currents within the Earth's mantle that drive this motion, plate tectonics supplied the robust physical framework that had long eluded proponents of crustal mobility. In doing so, it elegantly resolved the long-standing biogeographical and geological mysteries that early twentieth-century geologists had meticulously documented but could not theoretically justify.
Which of the following most accurately describes the relationship between the two passages?
- APassage A presents a collection of empirical anomalies that challenged a prevailing paradigm, while Passage B offers a competing interpretation of those same anomalies.
- BPassage A details an early scientific model for crustal movement, and Passage B provides the modern empirical evidence that proved that specific model to be entirely correct.
- CPassage B provides a concrete application of the theoretical framework that was fiercely defended by the geological establishment mentioned in Passage A.
- Passage A outlines a historical hypothesis and the primary theoretical grounds for its rejection, while Passage B explains a subsequent scientific framework that provides the causal mechanism needed to validate the core of that early hypothesis.Cevap
- EPassage B introduces new methodologies that explicitly refute the geographical and biological observations meticulously documented by the author in Passage A.