When public schooling began to expand access to education in the 19th century, literacy was mainly about learning to read, a set

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问题     When public schooling began to expand access to education in the 19th century, literacy was mainly about learning to read, a set of technical skills that individuals would acquire once for a lifetime in order to process a fairly established body of coded knowledge. For most, though not all, individuals in the industrialized world, those technical reading skills can now largely be taken for granted. But literacy requirements have shifted toward reading for learning—the capacity to identify, understand, interpret, create, and communicate knowledge, using written materials associated with varying situations in changing contexts. These skills have now become an almost universal requirement for success in the industrialized world.
    This shift in the concept of literacy is perhaps best illustrated with statistics on skill utilization in the labor force. It is no longer manual skills but routine cognitive skills that see the steepest decline in labor-market demand in advanced economies. Computers can replace humans for tasks involving processing of information through inductive or deductive rules. Routine cognitive skills are easier to outsource to foreign producers than other kinds of work: When a task can be reduced to rules, the process needs to be explained only once, so communicating with foreign producers is much simpler than for non-rules-based tasks where each piece of work is a special case. The reproduction of a fixed body of knowledge, acquired with technical reading skills, is therefore no longer sufficient. Individuals need the capacity to infer from what they know, to use knowledge in new ways or situations, and to generate new knowledge.
    Ensuring that assessments are comparable across countries is critical. Another challenge relates to external validity, verifying that literacy assessments measure what they set out to measure and that those skills are predictive for future outcomes of individuals. Adult literacy surveys show that competencies in major educational, training and work transitions are generally better predictors for earnings and employment status than the level of formal educational qualification that individuals had attained.     Important aspects of the "new literacy" concept, especially elements of creating and communicating information, remain beyond the scope of large-scale comparative assessment. The long-term future lies with multi-layered assessment systems that extend from classrooms to schools to regional to national to international levels, that measure not just what students know but also how students progress, that are largely performance-based, that make students’ thinking visible, and that allow for divergent thinking. Also, these assessments must generate data that teachers, administrators, and policymakers can act upon.
In the industrialized world, the concept of literacy _____.

选项 A、remains about acquiring knowledge
B、has shifted to cognitive abilities
C、depends upon various situations
D、is universally associated and accepted

答案B

解析 根据concept of literacy可定位到文章开头两段。第一段提到,从19世纪起,学文化仅仅指获得用来应付体系完善的编码知识(a fairly established body of coded knowledge)的一套技能,但在工业化时代,对文化水平的要求已转向为学习而阅读——运用在不同的情境中与多种环境相关的文本材料来认知、理解、阐释、创造和沟通知识的能力,这些能力正是第二段cognitive skills具体的表现形式,由此选B项“认知能力”。
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