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2013 ‫מועד דצמבר‬ - 41 - ‫ פרק ראשון‬- ‫ אנגלית‬

Text II (Questions 18-22)

(1) For most people, the word "intellectual" connotes someone engaged in literature
and the arts, not the sciences. The most commonly used American dictionary confirms
this prejudice, defining an intellectual as "a person devoted to matters of the mind and
especially to the arts and letters; one given to study, reflection, and speculation, especially

(5) concerning large, profound or abstract issues."

It was not always so. In fact, according to British physicist and novelist C. P. Snow,
only in the 1930s did literary theorists begin to use the word "intellectual" to refer solely
to themselves. Before then, the word carried the broader sense of a person involved in
the work of the mind – a definition which would clearly include scientists. Snow

(10) himself bemoaned the split between "scientists" and "intellectuals." In his 1959 book,
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, he noted that intellectuals and scientists
seemed to live in their own separate worlds. But he envisioned a third culture in which
the two groups would actually communicate with each other.

Snow's vision has not come to pass. If anything, matters have gotten worse in
(15) the years since the publication of his book. It appears that the intellectuals may be to

blame. In fact, some intellectuals not only cultivate their distance from the world of
science, but actually revel in it. Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist,
points out that "there are people in the arts and humanities . . . who are proud of
knowing very little about science and technology, or about mathematics." He notes
(20) that "the opposite phenomenon is very rare. You may occasionally find a scientist who
is ignorant of Shakespeare, but you will never find a scientist who is proud of being
ignorant of Shakespeare." Scientist Paul Davies believes that today's intellectuals try to
belittle science because they feel intimidated by complex ideas that they do not
understand. Their repudiation of science, he says, stems from their sense of
(25) "helplessness in the face of their ignorance."

These scientists, like others, resent the fact that the word "intellectual" has been
appropriated by those in the arts and the humanities – and by those who willfully ignore
a vast universe of knowledge and ideas. Perhaps it is time for today's self-proclaimed
intellectuals to open their minds and ranks to scientists, whose thinking is no less
(30) profound or important than theirs. At the very least, they should relinquish their claim
to be the only "intellectuals."

Questions

18. The "definition" mentioned in line 9 -

(1) includes people engaged in the sciences and the arts
(2) was first used in the 1930s
(3) includes scientists but not literary theorists
(4) was first used by C. P. Snow

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