Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 36 to 42.



One day, 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 was delivered instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. Of course, he missed the match.

What had happened? With the Sat-Nav system in place, the driver in this story felt he did not need to know where he was going. He confidently outsourced the job of knowing this information to the Sat-Nav. Using an Internet search engine takes a broadband user less than a second. And with smartphones at hand, people 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 case 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. It goes like this: Thoth offers writing as a gift to the king of Egypt, declaring it an "elixir of memory and wisdom." But the king is horrified, and tells him: "This invention will induce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written." Who wants to be a millionaire finalist David Swift, responding to the same question, recognises that there was a problem of young people saying: "I don't need to know that", but he is far more excited about the educational potential of the Internet. "There is so much more information out there, giving people opportunities to boost their general knowledge."

After all, the Internet might just help us to forget more and more. But meanwhile, the continuing popularity popularity of quizzes and game-shows shows us that general knowledge is strong enough to remain.



(Adapted from English Unlimited by Adrian Deff and Ben Gok)

Why did the middle aged man miss the football match?