2024届高考英语阅读理解五步法专项带练(30)讲义

（素材来源：广东省华附、省实、广雅、深中2024届高三四校联考英语试题） ①Is there actual evidence that a coin toss --the act of spinning a coin in the air with your thumb and catching it in your hand - tends to favor one side over the other? Or is a coin flip 50/50? A new study questions the fairness of the flip. ②One side of the coin is, in fact, more likely to come up than the other, according to a team of scientists led by University of Amsterdam PhD candidate František Bartoš. Their study, which is still undergoing peer review, collected and analyzed the results of 350, 757 coin flips in 46 different currencies and registered that the coins landed on the same side they started on 51% of the time. This research was done in an effort to confirm a hypothesis proposed earlier by Stanford University statistics professor Persi Diaconis and his team. According to that theory, “vigorously flipped coins tend to come up the same way they started.” ③According to Diaconis’s team, when people flip an ordinary coin, they introduce a small degree of “precession”, meaning a change in the direction of the axis(轴) of turning throughout a coin's track. Consequently, the coin tends to spend more time in the air with the initial side facing up. This makes a coin flip not quite 50/50. ④In 2007, Diaconis’s team estimated the odds of a “same-side outcome” as approximately 51%. Nearly a decade and a half later, Bartos and his team found this very result. They published a preliminary report stating, “Our data lend strong support to the previous hypothesis -The coins landed on the same side more often than not.” ⑤Moreover, this was true for both sides of the coin and for all of the different coins tossed. As Diaconis stated back in 1986, "The more you think about randomness, the less random things become. But sometimes, you can take advantage of a lack of randomness. "Indeed, when it comes to flipping a coin, the quickest shortcut to making your own luck might just be calling it literally as you see it. 28. What's the p