【推荐3】What is culture? It is difficult to define.     1     For some people it means literature, music and art. Others define it as beliefs, ways of behaving and the ideas of a particular group. Another broader definition says that it is all the knowledge and values of a society. Lord Raglan, a British soldier and author in the 20th century once famously said, “Culture is roughly everything we do and monkeys don’t.”

As you can see, there are different definitions of culture as there are different societies. One useful starting point is the idea of two types of culture. They are culture with a capital C and culture with a small c. Culture with a capital C refers to music, literature and art. It also includes facts and statistics about a national group or society.     2     A person is cultured if they know a lot about culture with a capital C. Many English-speaking countries now have citizenship tests for new immigrants.     3     Examples might include “Who wrote Hamlet?” or “Where does the Prime Minister of Canada Live?”

Culture with a small c refers to beliefs, values, traditions and the everyday life of a particular community.     4       In other words, they have lots of different cultures. Culture with a small c can be different from one part of a country to another. Travelers and people who do business with people from different places are often more interested in culture with a small c. Example questions could include “What time do Americans finish work?” or “Do Germans shake hands or kiss when they meet each other?”

    5     Culture gives a person a special identity. Culture gives a community or a country a unique character. Whatever the definition, culture plays an important part in everybody’s life.

【推荐1】Following Cook’s death in 1779, the Endeavour journal of James Cook is thought to have been held by his wife Elizabeth. There is no record of the journal’s movements following Elizabeth Cook’s death in 1835 until its appearance in 1923 when it was offered at auction (拍卖) by its owners the Bolckow family of Yorkshire. The family were unable to explain how they came to hold the journal. It had apparently been in the family’s library ‘for over fifty years, having been purchased by the late Bolckow’s uncle, but from whom and in what circumstances is unknown’.

On 21 March 1923 the Australian government purchased the Endeavour journal for £5000 for the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library.

The Mitchell Library, Sydney, had been chasing the journal since its discovery with the Bolckow family in 1922 before the auction, and had approached the Commonwealth Government for a financial contribution towards the purchase. Though Interim (临时的) Commonwealth Parliamentary Librarian Arthur Wadsworth had guaranteed the Mitchell that there would be no competition for the item, Kenneth Binns (to be Wadsworth’s successor) felt that the Endeavour journal was more suited to remain within the nation’s library.

Binns put forward an eventually persuasive argument that the Commonwealth could not finance the Mitchell, ‘which was, after all, a private institution’. Prime Minister Bruce telegraphed the officer in London to instruct the Mitchell Library’s Chief Librarian, already in England anticipating the auction, to bid on behalf of the Commonwealth. The Mitchell Library accepted upon the understanding that it would be the keeper of the journal until such time that the Commonwealth Government had a suitable storing place, a National Library.

Upon arrival in Australia the journal was exhibited in Queens Hall, Melbourne, for a month after which it was taken to the Mitchell Library which held it for four years, before it was removed to Canberra.

【推荐3】We continue our Foreign Student Series on higher education in the United States. Now you move on to college life once you are admitted to a school. The first thing you need to value is a place to live. Housing policies differ from school to school. Students might have to live in a dormitory, at least for the first year there.

Dorms come in all sizes. Some have suites. Six or more students may live in one suite. Other dorms have many rooms along a common hallway, usually with two students in each room . Many students say dormitories provide the best chance to get to know other students. Also, dorms generally cost less than apartments or other housing not owned by the school

Most colleges and universities offer single-sex dorms, but usually males and females live in the same building. They might live on the same floors and share the same common bathrooms. They may live in the same room only if they are married.

Edward Spencer is the associate vice president for student affairs at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. He says it is important to understand the rules of the building in which you will live. He advises students to ask questions before they decide about their housing. For example, if a student requires a special diet, will the school provide it ? How much privacy can a student expect ? Will the school provide a single room if a student requests one ? And what about any other special needs that a student might have?

Virginia Tech, for example, had a ban against candles in dorms . But it changed that policy to let students light up candles for religious purposes. The university also has several dorms open all year so foreign students have a place to stay during vacation time.

【推荐1】Daniel Anderson, a famous psychologist, believes it’s important to distinguish television’s influences on children from those of the family. We tend to blame TV, he says, for problems it doesn’t really cause, overlooking our own roles in shaping children’s minds.

One traditional belief about television is that it reduces a child’s ability to think and to understand the world. While watching TV, children do not merely absorb words and images (影像). Instead, they learn both explicit and hidden meanings from what they see. Actually, children learn early the psychology of characters in TV shows. Furthermore, as many teachers agree, children understand far more when parents watch TV with them, explaining new words and ideas. Yet, most parents use an educational program as a chance to park their kids in front of the set and do something in another room.

Another argument against television is that it replaces reading as a form of entertainment. But according to Anderson, the amount of time spent watching television is not related to reading ability. TV doesn’t take the place of reading for most children; it takes the place of similar sorts of recreation, such as listening to the radio and playing sports. Things like parents’ educational background have a stronger influence on a child’s reading. “A child’s reading ability is best predicted by how much a parent reads,” Anderson says.

Traditional wisdom also has it that heavy television­watching lowers IQ (智商) scores and affects school performance. But here, too, Anderson notes that no studies have proved it. In fact, research suggests that it’s the other way around. “If you’re smart young, you’ll watch less TV when you’re older,” Anderson says. Yet, people of lower IQ tend to be lifelong television viewers.

For years researchers have attempted to show that television is dangerous to children. However, by showing that television promotes none of the dangerous effects as conventionally believed, Anderson suggests that television cannot be condemned without considering other influences.

【推荐2】When parents ask “What grade did you get?”, there is a common follow-up question: “So who got the highest grade?” Many educators select and publicly announce “the best student” in a class or school. Adults praise children for outperforming others. Sports tournaments award those who surpass others. The practice of making social comparisons is so common in daily life that the negative effects caused by social comparisons are usually ignored.

One well-known strategy to get rid of social comparisons is to provide children with participation awards, which means children get the same prize despite their performance. Such awards, however, may not abolish social comparisons. High-performing children may feel unjustly treated and look down on the latter group. More generally those who receive unwarranted(无正当理由的) rewards may come to believe they deserve to receive the recognition.

How, then, can we make children feel proud of themselves and motivate them without the unwanted side effects? A better approach is to use temporal comparisons-encouraging children to compare themselves with their past self rather than with others.

Researchers recently conducted a study, where 583 children were asked to do a reading-and-writing exercise designed to influence the kind of comparisons they would make: social comparisons or temporal comparisons. Results showed children who compared themselves with others said they wanted to be superior to such people, while those who compared themselves with their past self said they wanted to improve rather than be superior. Temporal comparisons changed children’s goals away from a desire for superiority and toward self-improvement.

What, then, can parents and teachers do with this knowledge? Parents and teachers can praise children’s improvement over time to let them know they are making progress. Also, teachers can create learning contexts that track children’s own progress over time, such as report cards that display their changes in learning and performance.

Of course, temporal comparisons are not a panacea; we should never push children too much to improve themselves. The road toward self-improvement is paved with struggles and setbacks. Rather than making children feel bad for those failures, we should encourage them to learn from their imperfect past self-and thus help youngsters become better than before.

【推荐3】Researchers recently studied 3, 000 middle and high school students. Among them were 618 teenagers with one parent who lived away from home for long periods of time because of work. The researchers wanted to know how the work of these “fly-in, fly-out” parents might influence the health of their children.

A higher percentage of teenagers who experienced the long absence of a parent had emotional (情感的) or behavioral problems compared with those whose parents worked more traditional hours. This supports earlier research finding high percentages of emotional problems in teenagers who often returned to an empty house after school or whose parents were seldom at dinner.

Findings also suggest that parents don’t have to be home all the time to be present in their children’s lives, but it helps to be home at certain times. And the best parental presence for a teenager may sometimes be like a potted plant.

Many parents of teenagers have known this to be true and find ways to be present without trying to start a conversation. One friend of mine quietly does housework each evening in the sitting room where her teenagers watch TV. They enjoy one another’s company without the need to talk. Another friend usually accepts his daughter’s invitation to work or read nearby while she sits and does her homework. Perhaps, that, at least for some families, is the best way for teenagers and their parents to stay close.

In fact, many years of research suggest that children use their parents as a safe base from which to explore the world. Studies tell us that young children quietly follow their parents’ movements from room to room, even while carrying on with their own activities. Perhaps our teens, like babies, feel most at ease when their parents are still around. They don’t want to stay away from parents who allow them freedom. A new school year is at hand, so as parents we could offer our teenagers a “potted flower” as a gift, whose quiet and steady (稳定的) presence will give them a great day.