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.

   Our society today is implicitly providing an infrastructure for outsourcing knowledge. Most of us wouldn’t know how to get grain seeds, how to sow, till, harvest them, make flour, make bread and so on. Most of the things that we rely upon every single day are beyond our capability of producing, and for most of them we don’t even have the knowledge required. Yet this is not a problem, our knowledge is about using something that someone else had produced and made available. We accept this implicitly because, by far, this works. Besides, there is no alternative. A single person would not have the possibility 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 geared towards a segmentation. We get the basic tools we need to learn, and then we apply them to learn some specific things. The tools available for learning have increased in the last decades and they keep increasing to the point that it is becoming impossible to learn all of them. Hundred years ago it was about learning to read and write and little else. Then we learnt the tools of the trade, the specific one in our profession.

    Now young people have to learn how to use the Internet (only very few know how to build the Internet system and we are not teaching them) and have to learn to apply specific tools to extract knowledge from a rapidly growing set of data. Soon they will have to learn how to use augmented reality and virtual reality, how to interact with collaborative robots, and how to balance their knowledge with the one of artefacts. In the meantime, the knowledge half-life (the time it takes for 50% of what they know to lose its value, become useless, or superseded) is shrinking. It is now below 5 years in technology areas (IT knowledge reaches its half-life in less than 2 years!). More than ever in the past knowing how to ask the right question and “whom” to ask becomes crucial. This is happening and effective steps should be taken before it is too late.

*implicitly 不明言地，含蓄地, 絕對地，無疑地
suggested though not directly expressed/always to be found in; essentially connected with/with no qualification or question; absolute
*infrastructure 基礎建設
the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise
*alternative 可替代的；可供選擇的, 非傳統的；另類的
(of one or more things) available as another possibility or choice/relating to activities that depart from or challenge traditional norms
*segmentation 分割
division into separate parts or sections
*geared 齒輪轉動的
*artefacts （尤指具有史學價值的）人工製品，製造物，手工藝品 (文中指的應該是人工智慧)
an object that is made by a person, such as a tool or a decoration, especially one that is of historical interest
* superseded (原型動詞supersede) 替代，取代（尤指陳舊或過時之物）
to replace something, especially something older or more old-fashioned
*shrinking (原型動詞shrink) （使）縮小，（使）變小/畏縮，退縮
to become smaller, or to make something smaller/to move away from someone or something because you are frightened