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Tools for thought
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[ID] => 559754
[post_author] => 12815
[post_date] => 2025-01-02 10:19:50
[post_date_gmt] => 2025-01-02 15:19:50
[post_content] => Practice Passage (Question 1-4)
*This passage is the property of Khan Academy and has been reformatted into an AAMC-style interface in their entirety by MedLife Mastery. MedLife Mastery does not endorse and is not an affiliate of Khan Academy.
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
My first encounters with how computers change the way we think came soon after I joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the end of the era of the slide rule and the beginning of the era of the personal computer. At a lunch for new faculty members, several senior professors in engineering complained that the transition from slide rules to calculators had affected their students’ ability to deal with issues of scale. When students used slide rules, they had to insert decimal points themselves. The professors insisted that doing that required students to maintain a mental sense of scale, whereas those who relied on calculators made frequent errors in orders of magnitude. Additionally, the students with calculators had lost their ability to do “back of the envelope” calculations, and with that, an intuitive feel for the material.
That same semester, I taught a course in the history of psychology. There, I experienced the impact of computational objects on students’ ideas about their emotional lives. My class had read Freud’s essay on slips of the tongue, with its famous first example: The chair of a parliamentary session opens a meeting by declaring it closed. The students discussed how Freud interpreted such errors as revealing a person’s mixed emotions. A computer science major disagreed with Freud’s approach. The mind, she argued, is a computer. And in a computational dictionary—like we have in the human mind—closed and open are designated by the same symbol, separated by a sign for opposition. Closed equals minus open. To substitute closed for open does not require the notion of ambivalence or conflict. “When the chairman made that substitution,” she declared, “a bit was dropped; a minus sign was lost. There was a power surge. No problem.” The young woman turned a Freudian slip into an information-processing error. An explanation in terms of meaning had become an explanation in terms of mechanism.
Today, starting in elementary school, students use e-mail, word processing, computer simulations, and virtual communities. In the process, they are absorbing more than the content of what appears on their screens. They are learning new ways to think about what it means to know and understand.
There are a number of areas where I see information technology encouraging changes in thinking. There can be no simple way of cataloging whether any particular change is good or bad. That is contested terrain. At every step we have to ask, as educators and citizens, whether current technology is leading us in directions that serve our human purposes. Such questions are not technical; they are social, moral, and political. For me, addressing that subjective side of computation is one of the more significant challenges for the next decade of information technology in higher education. Technology does not determine change, but it encourages us to take certain directions. If we make those directions clear, we can more easily exert human choice.
Adapted from S. Turkle, How computers change the way we think. ©2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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[quiz_unique_key] => 578908434
[question] => Based on the passage, the author most likely believes that it is important to understand the influence computers have on people because such understanding will:
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[answer] => 1
[description] => Reason for the Correct Answer:
This is a “Foundations of Comprehension” question, which means that it wants you to understand the author’s central theme or ideas or point-of-view.
In the last paragraph the author asserts “At every step we have to ask, as educators and citizens, whether current technology is leading us in directions that serve our human purposes” The author then closes with the statement, “Technology does not determine change, but it encourages us to take certain directions. If we make those directions clear, we can more easily exert human choice” (paragraph 5). Her premise is that articulating and understanding the effect that tools have on our way of thinking helps us to better optimize those tools to serve our needs (option A). The passage does not offer any conjecture about how this understanding might change the importance of technology in the next decade (option B). Although the example of how using a slide rule might have led to better understanding of scale than using a calculator is included (option C), this is not offered as a reason to better understand the influence of computers. The author cites an example of a student comparing the human mind to a computer, but the key idea is to show how learning about a tool can shape how we think about something. The author doesn’t discuss the desire to test theories about the human mind as a computational object as the main reason to better understand the influence that computers have on people (option D).
Thus, option A is correct.
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[each_answer] => A. enable people to make computers serve human purposes.
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(
[each_answer] => B. increase the importance of information technology in the next decade.
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[each_answer] => C. improve people’s ability to deal with issues of scale.
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[each_answer] => D. help prove that the human mind is a computational object.
)
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[1] => Array
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[quiz_unique_key] => 3873426850
[question] => Which of the following passage assertions is presented as evidence that computers are affecting people’s conception of the mind?
[value] => Array
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[answer] => 3
[description] => Reason for the Correct Answer:
This is a “Reasoning Within the Text” question, which means that it wants you to explore the key idea, claim, or theme that is being expressed in a passage. You will have to evaluate the soundness of an argument, the reasonableness of its conclusions, and/or the appropriateness of its generalizations. It is crucial to carefully examine the strengths and weaknesses of the key ideas based on the information given.
The author presents the examples of engineering students making more mistakes of scale when using calculators (option A), and losing their intuitive sense for calculation (option B) to characterize the loss of particular skill sets. These examples do not provide evidence that computers are affecting people’s thinking about the mind. The author uses the example of a computer science major who interpreted a Freudian slip as an information-processing error as evidence that computers are affecting people’s conception of the mind. The student said, “a bit was dropped; a minus sign was lost. There was a power surge. No problem” (paragraph 3). This offers an alternative to the Freudian paradigm of the mind, and thus serves as evidence that computers are offering another metaphor for understanding the human mind. The passage does mention retention that evaluating the impact of technology on thinking will be a challenge in higher education (option D), but this is not related to the idea that computers may be changing people’s conception of the mind.
Thus, option C is correct.
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[0] => Array
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[each_answer] => A. Engineering students using calculators frequently make mistakes regarding orders of magnitude.
)
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[each_answer] => B. Students who used calculators lost their ability to do “back of the envelope” calculations.
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[each_answer] => C. A computer science major interpreted a Freudian slip as an information-processing error.
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[each_answer] => D. Addressing the subjective side of computation is a significant challenge for the next decade of information technology in higher education.
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[quiz_unique_key] => 83407773
[question] => Of the following scenarios, which represents an example most similar to what the author probably means by the opening statement, “The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think”?
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[answer] => 3
[description] => Reason for the Correct Answer:
This is a “Reasoning Beyond the Text” question, which means that it wants you to either apply or extrapolate the ideas in the passage to new situations or to assess how new information would impact the ideas presented in the passage. It is important to understand the assumptions underlying the article, and how new information may or may not shift the central thesis.
Having an event like a power outage (option A), or recognizing a similar pattern in communication systems across two species (option B) do not change the way we think by providing humans with fundamental new tools. Although new accounting software represents a new tool (option D), any benefit of increased productivity may be a direct effect from the software, and may not necessarily reflect fundamental changes in the thinking of the humans who use it. However, exposure to a new way of thinking about complementary colors can change the way that an abstract painting is appreciated. In this case, the new theory can be seen as the tool that alters perception and thought about the painting (option C).
Thus, option C is correct.
)
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[0] => Array
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[each_answer] => A. After a power outage, a person creates a plan for coping with such events in the future.
)
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[each_answer] => B. An analysis of the sequences of clicks emitted by dolphins reveals structural similarity to aspects of human language.
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[each_answer] => C. A person gains a new appreciation for abstract painting after learning about a new theory of complementary colors.
)
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[each_answer] => D. An office manager increases productivity by installing new accounting software on the company’s computers.
)
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[quiz_unique_key] => 4240073053
[question] => Which of the following passage assertions is most supported in the passage by evidence or examples?
[value] => Array
(
[answer] => 1
[description] => Reason for the Correct Answer:
This is a “Reasoning Within the Text” question, which means that it wants you to explore the key idea, claim, or theme that is being expressed in a passage. You will have to evaluate the soundness of an argument, the reasonableness of its conclusions, and/or the appropriateness of its generalizations. It is crucial to carefully examine the strengths and weaknesses of the key ideas based on the information given.
In the third paragraph, the author asserts that computational objects have an impact on student’s ideas about their emotional lives, and offers evidence by including the example of a computer science major in her class who viewed Freudian slips as an information processing error, rather than as the consequence of repressed emotions (option A). The potential downsides to calculator use she cites from past conversations with colleagues are anecdotal examples, not assertions that are further supported by evidence (options B and C). The author does assert that the invention of writing systems brought about radical changes in thinking in the first paragraph, but no evidence is offered for this statement (option D).
Thus, option A is correct.
)
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[each_answer] => A. Computational objects have an impact on students’ ideas about their emotional lives.
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[each_answer] => B. When students used slide rules, they had to insert decimal points themselves.
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[each_answer] => C. Students who used calculators lost their ability to do “back of the envelope” calculations.
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[each_answer] => D. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world.
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[559754|3] => C
[559754|4] => A
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