CPE Reading and Use of English Part 6
You are going to read an article about expertise. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A–H the one which fits each gap (37–43). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Rethinking What It Means to Be an Expert
Hearing the word expert we often conjure up an image of someone who possesses a vast store of information: the chess grandmaster who can recall thousands of board positions, the doctor who can list obscure syndromes from memory, the historian who can summon dates at will. This view flatters our cultural attachment to intelligence as accumulation. Yet psychological research suggests that expertise is less a matter of what is stored than of how perception itself is organised.
Studies of chess masters, for instance, show that their advantage lies not in raw computational power but in the ability to recognise meaningful patterns. Presented with realistic game positions, they recall board configurations with astonishing accuracy; shown random arrangements, their superiority largely disappears. What they “see” on the board are not isolated pieces but structured relations, which only become apparent through years of deliberate practice.
This insight has consequences beyond the chessboard. In medicine, this perceptual reorganisation can be a matter of life and death. Experienced clinicians often reach accurate diagnoses with remarkable speed, sometimes before they can articulate the reasoning behind them. Far from being guesswork, such judgments are grounded in a heightened sensitivity to subtle cues: the particular hue of a patient’s skin, the rhythm of breathing, the incongruity of a reported symptom with the overall clinical picture.
The same logic applies well beyond traditional professions. Seasoned mechanics detect engine problems by sound, not by checklist; accomplished editors feel that a sentence “doesn’t work” before identifying the grammatical cause. In each case, the expert response is not only faster than the novice’s, but qualitatively different, rooted in patterns that have become second nature.
Yet this efficiency has a less reassuring side. When perception becomes attuned to familiar regularities, it may also become less responsive to anomalies. Highly experienced practitioners are not immune to error; indeed, they may be especially susceptible to overlooking information that does not fit established patterns.
This has important implications for how expertise is cultivated. If mastery were simply a matter of accumulating facts, then instruction would consist primarily in transmission. But if, as evidence suggests, it involves the gradual reshaping of perception, then learning must be organised around exposure, feedback and reflection. Novices need opportunities not just to be told what to notice, but to confront situations in which noticing becomes unavoidable.
This is not to glorify intuition or to deny the role of explicit knowledge. Experts are often able to explain their reasoning when required, and formal understanding can guide where attention is directed. The point, rather, is that the endpoint of expertise is not the possession of rules but the transformation of experience. The world comes to present itself differently.
To recognise this is to challenge a deeply ingrained scholastic myth: that competence resides primarily in what the mind contains. Expertise, in this light, is less like a library than like a lens. It is not that the expert knows more; it is that the expert sees otherwise – something that simply cannot be taught.
A Such findings have prompted psychologists to reconsider long-standing distinctions between knowledge and perception. Rather than treating seeing and thinking as separate stages, many now argue that in expert performance they are inseparable: cognition begins not after perception, but within it.
B The limits of rule-based accounts become clear when attempts are made to reproduce expert performance artificially. Early artificial-intelligence systems, for example, excelled in well-defined domains but struggled in environments where success depended on picking up diffuse, context-dependent signals.
C It also clarifies why experts are not always the most effective teachers. Much of what they respond to has become so immediate that it escapes conscious access, making it difficult to reconstruct the intermediate steps a beginner requires. The ability to break it all down is what really matters.
D At the same time, it helps account for the frequent discomfort experts report when asked to justify their decisions. What feels like an instant recognition must be laboriously translated into language, often after the fact. Putting your nuanced reasoning into words seems to be a bigger challenge for them than simply making an informed decision.
E Paradoxically, the way expert perception operates can create vulnerabilities. When patterns are over-learned, unexpected variations may be overlooked, leading even highly experienced practitioners into error. Extreme confidence and jaded perspective might also contribute to glazing over seemingly unimportant elements of the pattern.
F The development of expertise, then, cannot be rushed. It depends on prolonged engagement with meaningful situations, through which initially opaque details gradually acquire significance. Only through repeated encounters with real, variable contexts do learners begin to differentiate what matters from what is incidental, and to recalibrate their attention accordingly.
G Historically, however, educational systems have been slow to accommodate this view, remaining wedded to models of learning that privilege instruction over participation. The positive impact of hands-on approach is often downplayed or outright ignored by those responsible for the curriculum.
G What unites these diverse cases is not superior memory, but a particular way they direct their attention. Experts come to register distinctions that neophytes don’t come even close to being aware of. This, naturally, is only possible given the sheer amount of experience they have accumulated over the course of their careers.
For this task: Answers with explanations :: Vocabulary
