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  3. What is Culture? Culture, in anthropology(人类学), the patterns of behavior and thinking that people living in social groups le

What is Culture? Culture, in anthropology(人类学), the patterns of behavior and thinking that people living in social groups le

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问题                          What is Culture?
    Culture, 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 people’s culture includes their beliefs, rules of behavior, language, rituals, 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). Anthropologists 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 culture—and in particular, common rules of behavior and a basic form of social organization—constitutes a society. Thus, the terms culture and society are somewhat interchangeable. However, while many animals live in societies, such as herds of elk (麋鹿) or packs of wild dogs, only humans have culture.
    Characteristics of culture
    People have culture primarily because they can communicate with and understand symbols. Symbols allow people to develop complex thoughts and to exchange these 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 connection 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 call the United States, the concept of patriotism, or the U.S. national anthem (圣歌), 7he Star Spangled Banner.
    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 language—a sort of universal grammar—built into their minds. Infants are thus predisposed(有……倾向) to learn the 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 relatives of humans, use h few dozen calls and a variety of gestures to communicate in the wild. People have taught some chimps (黑猩猩) to communicate using American Sign Language and picture-bused languages, and some have developed vocabularies of a few hundred words. But an unabridged (完整的) English dictionary might contain more than half-a-million vocabulary entries. 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 distinct words. In fact, each human language uses only a fraction of 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.
    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 the rules of a society. In many societies, all people mast learn to produce and prepare food and to construct shelters. In other societies, people must learn a skill to earn money, which they then use to provide for themselves. In all human societies, children learn culture from adults. Anthropologists call this process enculturation, or cultural transmission.
    Enculturation is a long process. Just learning the intricacies (复杂) of a human language, a major part of enculturation, takes many years. Families commonly protect and enculturate (使适应某种文化的) children in the households of their birth for 15 years or mere. Only at this point can children leave and establish their own households. People also continue to learn throughout their lifetimes. Thus, most societies respect their elders, who have learned for an entire lifetime.
    Humans are not alone in their ability to learn behaviors, only in the amount and complexity of what they can learn. For example, members of a group of chimpanzees may learn to use a unique source of food or to fashion same simple tools, behaviors that might distinguish them from other chimpanzee groups. But these unique ways of life are minor in comparison to the rich cultures that distinguish different human societies. Lacking speech, chimps are very limited in what they can learn, communicate to others.
    People living together in a society share culture. For example, almost all people living in the United States share the English language, dress in similar styles, eat many of the same foods, and celebrate many of the same holidays.
    All the people of a society collectively create and maintain culture. Societies preserve culture for much longer than the life of any one person. They preserve it in the form of knowledge, such as scientific discoveries; objects, such as works of art; and traditions, such as the observance of holidays.
    Culture helps human societies survive in changing natural environments. For example, the end of the last Ice Age, beginning about 15,000 years ago, posed an enormous challenge to which humans had to adapt. Before this time, large portions of the northern hemisphere were covered in great sheets of ice that contained much of the earth’s water. In North America, large game animals that roamed (漫游，游历) the vast tundra (冻土地带) that provided people with food and materials for clothing and simple shelters. When the earth warmed, large Ice Age game animals disappeared, and many land areas were submerged by rising sea levels from melting ice. But people survived. They developed new technologies and learned how to live on new plant and animal species. Eventually some people settled into villages of permanent, durable houses and farms.
    Cultural adaptation has made humans one of the most successful species on the planet. Through history, major developments in technology, medicine, and nutrition have allowed people to reproduce and survive in ever-increasing numbers. The global population has risen from 8 million during the Ice Age to almost 6 billion today.
Four distinguishing characteristics of culture are mentioned in the passage.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案A
解析 文中提到的文化的四个特点是“culture is symbolic，learned，shared and adaptive．”
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