English Unlimited HTL 4/5, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

108 Unit 9: Knowledge and technology 6it7at Goals talk and write a blog comment about knowledge and technology discuss how to access information describe technological advances deliver a positive message write a proposal write a report write a business email / a formal email The end of general knowledge? In what ways could you find out: 1 how automotive production lines work? 2 the capital of Burkina Faso? 3 about the process of die casting? 4 your current destination when travelling by car? 5 biographical data about a scientist for a research project? Read the start of an article about technology and general knowledge. 1 Why do you think the mistake happened? 2 Whose fault do you think it was? SPEakIng 1 a REaDIng 2 One day last year a middle-aged man asked a taxi to take him to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. He told the driver “Stamford Bridge”, the name of Chelsea’s stadium, but he delivered him instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, nearly 150 miles in the opposite direction. Of course, he missed the match. What point is the journalist making? What do you think he will go on to say? Read the next part to check. b What had happened? The man in this story had handed over responsibility for knowing geography to a machine. With the satnav system in place, he felt that he did not need to know where he was going. That was the machine’s job. He confidently outsourced the job of knowing this information, or of finding it out, to that little computer on the dashboard. Is that what the future holds for us? Using an internet search engine (once you have keyed the words in) takes a broadband user less than a second, and the process will only get quicker. And soon with our smartphones at hand, almost all of us will be online almost all of the time.  The same could be true of university education. Today, the average student seems not to value general knowledge. If asked a factual question, they will usually click on a search engine without a second thought. Actually knowing the fact and committing it to memory does not seem to be an issue, it’s the ease with which we can look it up.  However, general knowledge has never been something that you acquire formally. Instead, we pick it up from all sorts of sources as we go along, often absorbing facts without realising. The question remains, then: is the internet threatening general knowledge? When I put that to Moira Jones, expert in designing IQ tests, she referred me to the story of the Egyptian god Thoth. I looked it up. It was told by Plato 2,400 years ago. It goes like this: Thoth invents writing and proudly offers it as a gift to the king of Egypt, declaring it an ‘elixir of memory and wisdom’. But the king is Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv