原文第三段：

Design courses,then,should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking,a central mechanism in engineering design,involves perceptions,the stock-in-trade of the artist,not the scientist. 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.

2.It can be inferred that the author thinks engineering curricula are

[A] strengthened when they include courses in design.

[B] weakened by the substitution of physical science courses for courses designed to develop mathematical skills.

[C] strong because nonverbal thinking is still emphasized by most of the courses.

[D] strong despite the errors that graduates of such curricula have made in the development of automatic control systems.

「答案」A

「考点解析」这是一道反推题。根据题干中的“engineering curricula”可将本题的正确答案信息来源确定在原文的第三段句。该句中“should”一词的理解十分重要。“should”是“应该做”而实际上确“没有做”。根据“should”一词并且结合第三段句进行反推即逆向思维，可得出本题的正确选项是A.考生在解题时应该重视关键的语言信号词，更要加强反推的能力。