DIFFERENT CULTURES ALL OVER THE WORLD
А. Нelo! Haven’t seen you for ages! Where have you been?
B. Hello! I have visited Japan recently. It was great! The culture in Japan differs from ours.
A. Naturally. Cultures differ from country to country.
B. You are right. Everything is different: food, clothes. The way they eat, the way they speak.
A. I understand. I’ve read a lot about different cultures. People’s nationalities can even be recognized by the way they greet each other.
B. Sure. We used to shake hands when we meet. But in Japan people usually bow...
A. Sorry for interrupting you. And the French usually kiss each other on the cheeks.
B. Sometimes we do the same. But still European and Asian cultures differ greatly!
A. You are lucky to have visited Asia! Have you taken photos there?
B. Of course. Come on Sunday and I’ll show you all of them.
A. Thanks. I’ll visit you with pleasure.
EXERCISE 19. Act as an interpreter.
A) AN ENGLISHMAN ABOUT RUSSIA
Russian students are talking with Mr. Black, an Englishman from London.
- Мистер Блэк; культуpa вашей страны отличается от нашей?
- Sometimes, it does. Sometimes, it does not.
- Что показалось вам необычным в России?
- People are not always polite. They don’t wait their turn in the queue.
- Да, я был в вашей стране. Англичане выстраиваются в очередь за всем.
- Yes. You are right. Not only in the shops but waiting for a bus.
- Что-нибудь еще?
- Russian people behave loudly in the streets, in buses and on train.
- Да, мы шумный народ. Что вам у нас понравилось?
- Many things. Your country is very beautiful. Many people are kind and hospitable. A lot of them can speak English perfectly well.
- Собираетесь ли вы еще приехать в Россию?
- Yes, I am. I am going to visit your country with my daughter.
- Добро пожаловать в Россию!
- Thank you.
B) INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD ALEXANDER, AN INFLUENTIAL THEORETICIAN, WHO APPLIES EVOLUTIONARY THEORY TO HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND MORALITY
Q: Некоторые виды живут группами. Но есть и такие, которые постоянно или периодически живут одни. В чем же недостатки групп?
A: There are lots of disadvantages of living in groups, and to understand why reproducing organisms who are competing with one another live in groups you always have to find some definite advantages. It is not advantageous to just cluster, because when you do this, there are many individuals competing for the same food in one place, you may have to eat food that another animal already walked over or picked over, you have to defend your mates or fight for mates, etc. If you think in terms of Darwin’s “hostile forces of nature”, you just go down through them one by one, you will find that living in a group is potentially harmful to almost everyone.
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Q: Почему люди живут большими группами? Ведь на Земле нет такого хищника, который бы мог нас так устрашить, что мы были вынуждены жить в группах?
A: I think that most people accept the hypothesis that early human group-living evolved as group-hunting or group-foraging, but why did human groups keep on growing, even when we were able to subdue our predators, and bigger groups would not do any good? My hypothesis, though Darwin and others had the same ideas, is that eventually other human groups became a very important driving force in causing human groups to get bigger and stronger. We know that today it is definitely other human groups that we see as our most important adversaries, and we design our social life to a large extent around the existence of those other groups. We have a hard time in escaping the tendency to divide the world into ‘us’ and all those other guys.
Q: В больших человеческих сообществах существует так называемый конфликт интересов. Почему же, несмотря на этот конфликт интересов, люди продолжают жить большими группами?
A: We have these things that philosophers call ‘moral systems’. It is instructive to realize that these systems tend to just go to the boundaries of the group; they tend not to include the members of other groups. Across the decades moral philosophers and other people have gradually come to the idea that moral systems are systems for keeping competing individuals together, by prescribing not to infringe beyond a certain point on the rights of others. I think that morality might have begun as the honouring by males of the pair bonds between other males and females. That would involve something very dear to everyone, namely the integrity of the family, and it would also involve that thing which is distinctly human, namely that we are able to get along with multiple males in the group. For example in Yanomamu Indians, any group that drops below seven healthy males, is said to be certain to disappear, by being taken over by another group. There are minimum-sizes, and these minimum-sizes are related to the sizes and strengths of the other groups around. So moral rules and systems are systems of controlling the tendencies of individuals to behave selfishly. And look, when we get into conflict with another group, that’s when the rules rise up in their importance. We expect people in time of war not to do things that take advantage of the circumstances, but rather to behave in the interests of the entire group. The risk is much larger if you don’t follow the rules and get caught at it when everybody is expecting everybody to be cooperative.
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EXERCISE 20.
a) Learn the following phrases:
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