英美文化概况论文

The Differences of Teenagers’ Life Between China and America

It is universally known that teenagers are the expectation of their parents and the hope of a nation, and almost all the countries in the world, including C hina and America of course, pay much attention to the teenagers’ life. However, because of the differences of culture in different countries, teenagers are obviously not living a same life. And in this article, I want to talk about some differences of teenagers’ life between China and America, for life of teenagers in these two countries are both typical.

First of all, let’s go into schools and find out how teenagers s pending a day at school.

As a Chinese student, I really know the teenagers’ life at school in China. We have to get up early so as not to be late for classes in the weekdays, and there are nearly ten lessons, which contain Chinese, maths, physics, chemistry, English and so on, from moning to night so that many students, especially the highschool students, prefer to spend most of time staying in the classrooms rather than go to play games. As there are too many tasks of learning for us, sometimes we even think that doing things which have nothing to do with studing is just a waste of time. So now you should know that Chinese teenagers’ life at school seems to be a

little monotonous and there are few things to do except listening to the teachers in classes, reading books and doing exercises. And at the end of the day, we are always feeling very tired.

Compairde with Chinese teenagers’ life at school, American teenagers’ is easier and more colourful. American teenagers attend classes for an everage of only five hours a day, while Chinese teenagers spend about 10 hours a day. What’s more, although American teenagers should also learn a lot of subjects like mathematics, science, social studies (a subject that includes history, geography, citizenship and economics) and so on, the contents of these courses are much easier than Chinese students’. In result, American teenagers have relatively few tasks of learning, and they have far more free time to do things which they like.

After classes over, American teenagers will have more activities. For example, doing a part-time job is universal among the teenagers.There is an interesting fact that a ccording to a survey, it is found that “About 54 percent young students have no pocket money in America, and there are fewer chances to get money from their parents as their ages increase. It is also found that 68 percent American stude nts earn pocket money through doing part-time job in their spare time.”(Tin Jennifer, 2005) By this way, American teenagers not only earn pocket money, but also get many chances to train themselves to have the ability of adapting to environmental variety and the ability of living independently.

However, it seems to be hard for Chinese teenagers to do the same things like doing a part-time job as American teenagers. One of the reasons is that Chinese