Question 56-60    Our society today is implicitly providing an infrastructure for outsourcing knowledge. Most of uswouldn’t know how to get grain seeds, how to sow, till, harvest them, make flour, make bread and soon. Most of the things that we rely upon every single day are beyond our capability of producing, andfor most of them we don’t even have the knowledge required. Yet this is not a problem, our knowledgeis about using something that someone else had produced and made available. We accept this implicitlybecause, by far, this works. Besides, there is no alternative. A single person would not have thepossibility to possess all the knowledge that is now available and that is required to run our life.   We have come to accept this segmentation of knowledge and even our schooling system is gearedtowards a segmentation. We get the basic tools we need to learn, and then we apply them to learn somespecific things. The tools available for learning have increased in the last decades and they keepincreasing to the point that it is becoming impossible to learn all of them. Hundred years ago it wasabout learning to read and write and little else. Then we learnt the tools of the trade, the specific one inour profession.    Now young people have to learn how to use the Internet (only very few know how to build theInternet system and we are not teaching them) and have to learn to apply specific tools to extractknowledge from a rapidly growing set of data. Soon they will have to learn how to use augmentedreality and virtual reality, how to interact with collaborative robots, and how to balance theirknowledge with the one of artefacts. In the meantime, the knowledge half-life (the time it takes for50% of what they know to lose its value, become useless, or superseded) is shrinking. It is now below 5years in technology areas (IT knowledge reaches its half-life in less than 2 years!). More than ever inthe past knowing how to ask the right question and “whom” to ask becomes crucial. This is happeningand effective steps should be taken before it is too late.
56. Which of the following can best describe the main idea of this passage?
(A) The misconception of education today.
(B) The endless evolution of school education.
(C) The role of robots in collaborative learning.
(D) The importance of a segmentation of knowledge.