补充阅读B1U15.docx

1、补充阅读B1U15补充阅读B1Unit 1 University Student lifeEducationEducation is the process by which people acquire knowledge, skills, habits, values, or attitudes. The word education is also used to describe the results of the educational process. Ideally, education should help people develop an appreciation of

2、 their cultural heritage文化遗产and live more satisfying lives. It should also enable people to become more productive members of society, both as citizens sharing in democratic processes and as workers in the economy. The most common way to get an education is to attend school. But much education takes

3、 place outside the classroom. Education involves both learning and teaching. Sometimes, people learn by teaching themselves. But they also learn with the help of other people, such as parents or teachers. Parents are a childs first and perhaps most important teachers. They teach their children attit

4、udes, habits, and values that help shape the childrens character and remain with them throughout life. But few parents have either the time or the ability to teach their children everything they need to know. Instead, parents turn over many educational responsibilities to professional educators. Tea

5、chers and school district administrators have the chief responsibility for education. The organized instruction they provide is called formal education. Learning that results from less-organized instruction is called informal education. But many other institutions and agencies also provide education

6、. Churches, which are established mainly for worship礼拜, educate their members through church teachings. Libraries, newspapers, and such organizations as the Boy Scouts童子军 and Girl Scouts also educate people. Radio and television are especially effective means of education. For example, various TV pr

7、ograms provided by public television stations give millions of children in the United States valuable learning experiences. Since the late 1970s, computers have become important in education. Widespread use of word processing and financial software has helped people to be more productive. Also, the

8、ability to quickly search for information on the Internet, a worldwide network of connected computers, has begun to change the way formal education is provided. Education and civilizationEducation is as old as humanity. To survive, prehistoric people had to educate their children to hunt animals or

9、to plant and harvest grains, fruits, and vegetables for food. Prehistoric peoples also had to learn to cooperate and to live together peacefully. They found that they could not live together peacefully for long unless they learned to act in certain ways. Education taught them how to act and so helpe

10、d make society possible. A society that reaches a relatively complex level of development is called a civilization. For a society to achieve this level, its members must learn a great deal. They must become skilled in agriculture, commerce, government, industry, and the arts. Education is the chief

11、means of acquiring and teaching the essential knowledge and skills. A modern society would not survive without education. Education is more important today than ever before. It helps people acquire the skills they need for such everyday activities as reading a newspaper or managing their money. It a

12、lso gives them the specialized training they may need to prepare for a job or career. For example, people must meet certain educational requirements and obtain a license or certificate before they may practice accounting, law, or medicine. Many fields, such as computer or police work, require specia

13、l training. Also, there is considerable evidence that people who achieve higher levels of education earn higher wages. Education is important because it helps people increase their knowledge and understanding of the world. Education helps people acquire skills that make their lives more interesting

14、and enjoyable. Such skills include those needed to participate in a sport, paint a picture, or play a musical instrument. Education also helps people adjust to change. This benefit has become increasingly important because social changes today take place with increasing speed and affect the lives of

15、 more and more people. Education can help a person understand these changes and provide the skills for adjusting to them. Most countries consider education one of the most important areas of public life. Countries throughout the world invest large amounts of time, money, and other resources to provi

16、de education for their citizens. Almost 20 percent of all the people in the world are directly involved in education as students or teachers in elementary schools, middle or junior high schools, high schools, colleges, or universities. In industrialized countries, such as Canada, Japan, the United K

17、ingdom, and the United States, about 25 percent of the people are directly involved in education. Millions more people hold nonteaching jobs related to education. These jobs include school cafeteria workers, nurses, and secretaries; school bus drivers; textbook publishers; and producers of education

18、al materials and equipment. Unit 2 Culture ShockCultureCulture, in anthropology人类学, the patterns of behavior and thinking that people living in social groups learn, create, and share. Culture distinguishes one human group from others. It also distinguishes humans from other animals. A peoples cultur

19、e includes their beliefs, rules of behavior, language, rituals礼节, art, technology, styles of dress, ways of producing and cooking food, religion, and political and economic systems.Culture is the most important concept in anthropology (the study of all aspects of human life, past and present). Anthr

20、opologists commonly use the term culture to refer to a society or group in which many or all people live and think in the same ways. Likewise, any group of people who share a common cultureand in particular, common rules of behavior and a basic form of social organizationconstitutes a society. Thus,

21、 the terms culture and society are somewhat interchangeable可互换的. However, while many animals live in societies, such as herds of elk麋鹿or packs of wild dogs, only humans have culture.Culture developed together with the evolution进化of the human species, Homo sapiens人类, and is closely related to human b

22、iology生物学. The ability of people to have culture comes in large part from their physical features: having big, complex brains; an upright直立posture; free hands that can grasp and manipulate操作small objects; and a vocal tract声道that can produce and articulate发音a wide range of sounds. These distinctively

23、 human physical features began to develop in African ancestors of humans more than four million years ago. The earliest physical evidence of culture is crude stone tools produced in East Africa over two million years ago.Culture Is Symbolic People have culture primarily because they can communicate

24、with and understand symbols符号. Symbols allow people to develop complex thoughts and to exchange those thoughts with others. Language and other forms of symbolic communication, such as art, enable people to create, explain, and record new ideas and information.A symbol has either an indirect connecti

25、on or no connection at all with the object, idea, feeling, or behavior to which it refers. For instance, most people in the United States find some meaning in the combination of the colors red, white, and blue. But those colors themselves have nothing to do with, for instance, the land that people c

26、all the United States, the concept of patriotism爱国, or the U.S. national anthem国歌, The Star Spangled Banner星条旗.To convey new ideas, people constantly invent new symbols, such as for mathematical formulas数学公式. In addition, people may use one symbol, such as a single word, to represent many different

27、ideas, feelings, or values. Thus, symbols provide a flexible way for people to communicate even very complex thoughts with each other. For example, only through symbols can architects建筑师, engineers, and construction workers communicate the information necessary to construct a skyscraper摩天楼or bridge.

28、People have the capacity at birth to construct, understand, and communicate through symbols, primarily by using language. Research has shown, for example, that infants have a basic structure of languagea sort of universal grammarbuilt into their minds. Infants are thus predisposed预先安排(先天)to learn th

29、e languages spoken by the people around them.Language provides a means to store, process, and communicate amounts of information that vastly exceed the capabilities of nonhuman animals. For instance, chimpanzees黑猩猩, the closest genetic基因的relatives of humans, use a few dozen calls and a variety of ge

30、stures to communicate in the wild. People have taught some chimps to communicate using American Sign Language北美式手势语and picture-based languages, and some have developed vocabularies of a few hundred words. But an unabridged未删节的English dictionary might contain more than half-a-million vocabulary entri

31、es条目. Chimpanzees have also not clearly demonstrated the ability to use grammar, which is crucial for communicating complex thoughts.In addition, the human vocal tract, unlike that of chimpanzees and other animals, can create and articulate a wide enough variety of sounds to create millions of disti

32、nct words. In fact, each human language uses only a fraction of小部分the sounds humans can make. The human brain also contains areas dedicated to the production and interpretation of speech, which other animals lack. Thus, humans are predisposed in many ways to use symbolic communication.Culture Is Lea

33、rned People are not born with culture; they have to learn it. For instance, people must learn to speak and understand a language and to abide by遵守the rules of a society. In many societies, all people must learn to produce and prepare food and to construct shelters庇护所. In other societies, people must learn a skill to earn mon