We can achieve knowledge either actively or passively. We achieve it actively by direct experience, by testing and proving an idea, or by reasoning.

    We achieve knowledge passively by being told by someone else. Most of the learning that takes place in the classroom and the kind that happens when we watch TV or read newspapers or magazines is passive. Conditioned as we are to passive learning, it's not surprising that we depend on it in our everyday communication with friends and co-workers.

    Unfortunately, passive learning has a serious problem. It makes us tend to accept what we are told even when it is little more than hearsay (传闻) and rumor.

    Did you ever play the game Rumor? It begins when one person writes down a message but doesn't show it to anyone. Then the person whispers it, word for word, to another person. Thai person, in turn, whispers it to still another, and so on, through all the people playing the game. The last person writes down the message word for word as he or she hears it. Then the two written statements arc compared. Typically, the original message has changed.

    That's what happens in daily life. The simple fact that people repeat a story in their own words changes the story. Then, too, most people listen imperfectly. And many enjoy adding their own creative touch to a story, trying to improve on it, stamping it with their own personal style. Yet those who hear it think they know.

    This process is also found among scholars and authors: A statement of opinion by one writer may be restated as fact by another, who may in turn be quoted by yet another; and this process may continue, unless it occurs to someone to question the facts on which the original writer based his opinion or to challenge the interpretation he placed upon those facts.