跨文化作业1

Chapter 1 Culture

Part I questions

Case 1

1.What have you learned about Indian culture from this case?

The Indian culture is diverse and composed by the traditional custom and the newly concepts.

Text A the Nature of Culture

1.In what way is culture like an iceberg?

Some of the elements which make up culture are visible, whereas others are hard to discover. The idea behind this model is that culture can be pictured as an iceberg: only a very small portion of the iceberg can be seen above the water.

What features of culture can you infer from this simile?

The visible parts of culture are just expressions of its invisible parts. And it is difficult to understand people with different cultural backgrounds-we may observe the visible parts of “their iceberg”, but we cannot immediately see what are the foundations that these parts rest upon.

2.What features of culture can you infer from the metaphor “culture is our software”? Human around the world are physically pretty much the same. Culture provides the difference and transformation as software. As with any good software, we are vaguely aware of it as we use it.

3.In what way is culture like the water a fish swims in?

Our culture is so much a part of who we are and what the word is like for us that we do not notice it. We take it for granted. For most people, for most of their lives, everything they see and do take place in the same culture.

4.According to your understanding of all the similes and metaphors in this text, what does

culture include and what features does culture have?

Culture is the grammar of our behavior. It includes all the rules that make actions meaningful to the people around them. People learn their cultural grammar unconsciously and apply its rules automatically. It is difficult to describe the meaning system of people’s own culture.

Text B Definitions of culture

1. According to your understanding of all the definitions in this text, what does culture include and what features does culture have?

Culture is the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, actions, attitudes, hierarchies, religious, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and artifacts acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

Text C Characteristics of Culture

pare features of culture you have concluded from text A and B with the

characteristics of culture in text C

I n text C culture is learned, dynamic, pervasive, integrated and adaptive.