GRE Reading Comprehension
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Source: CHP
Design courses should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail "hard thinking," nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system.
Question List: 1 2
The author calls the predicament faced by the Historic American Engineering Record "paradoxical" most probably because
- A the publication needed drawings that its ownstaff could not make
- B architectural schools offered but did not require engineering design courses for their students
- C college students were qualified to make the drawings while practicing engineers were not
- D the drawings needed were so complicated that even students in architectural schools had difficulty making them.
- E engineering students were not trained to make the type of drawings needed to record the development of their own discipline