1 . In India, one of the most significant festivals is Diwali, which falls between October and November. It’s a five-day celebration that includes good food, fireworks, colored sand, and special candles and lamps.

In honor of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, people make special prayers on the first day to obtain blessings for welfare, success, and well-being. People welcome the goddess into their homes by decorating entrances with colorful lanterns and traditional designs. In addition, many people treat themselves to fine jewellery, praying for good fortune. Those who cannot afford so much, seek out cheaper items such as clothes or household goods.

The second day of the festival is called Kali Chaudas. For some, the day provides an opportunity to drive away misfortune from homes and businesses. They decorate their homes with clay lamps and create design patterns called Rangoli on the floor using colored powder or sand.

The third day is when the biggest celebrations occur, which begin early in the morning with a visit to a temple to seek the blessing of the goddess. As the sun sets, festival observers light up their homes with small lamps and enjoy delicious traditional foods with their loved ones.

The festival’s fourth day is celebrated in many different ways. Friends and relatives visit with gifts, sweets and best wishes for the season.

And the final day of the festival is called Bhai Dooj. It honors the close bond between brothers and sisters and is observed with traditional ceremonies and more delicious foods.

For children in India, Diwali is similar to Christmas. They get an entire week off from school and are treated to gifts, new clothes, amazing food, and, in the past at least, a large number of fireworks. It is no wonder that the festival ranks high among the country’s favorite celebrations.

2 . As the most significant and traditional festival in China, the Chinese New Year is associated with many traditions and customs. Some of these traditions are dying out, so people feel that the festival becomes less interesting and conventional.     1    

Kowtowing to Elders

Chinese New Year traditions regarding greeting are not like kissing, embracing, and handshaking in western countries. In the past, the first thing for a Chinese New Year visit started with kowtowing to the elders. You need to kneel down to show respect and gratitude to the elders.     2     Nowadays, the young generation rejects such a way of greeting, so the practice is abandoned gradually in modern cities, while in some rural areas, the tradition is still kept. 

Staying Up on Chinese New Year’s Eve

According to a legend, the fierce monster Nian would come to harm people and livestock(牲畜) on Chinese New Year’s Eve, which would cause great damage to people’s efforts of a whole year.     3     When staying up all night, people would find something to kill time, such as chatting, watching TV, playing cards or mahjong. It is really difficult to stay awake for a whole night, so Chinese people are beginning to abandon this tradition. 

No Sweeping or Dumping on the Lunar New Year’s Day

In the old days, it was considered improper to sweep the house, or dump rubbish on the first day of the lunar year, for it indicated that all the good luck and fortune would be driven far away.     4     Therefore, the practice is becoming obscure(鲜为人知的). 

Opening-door Firecrackers

People will set off firecrackers in the early morning of Lunar New Year’s Day.     5     People wish to welcome the good luck inside when they open their doors in the morning. Some companies will also set off opening-door firecrackers when people return to work. The firecrackers lead to air pollution and also bring potential risk, so now this tradition is rarely seen.

3 . People from East Asia tend to have more difficulties than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why.

Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly (均匀的) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.

“We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” Jack said. “Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and overlook the mouth.”

According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.

The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. “The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions,” Jack said. “Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion. Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.”

In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.

6 . Do you like Chinese traditional painting and dance? They are two important parts of the traditional Chinese art. But what about when they meet each other?

This year, a dance drama titled Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting (《只此青绿》) was staged on CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala and became popular.

According to CCTV, this poetic dance program was inspired by the 900-year-old Chinese painting A Panorama of Rivers and Mountains (《千里江山图》), created by Song Dynasty painter Wang Ximeng at about 18. The painting is amazing in its sweeping size, rich coloration and the expressive details, reported by CCTV. It shows a Chinese blue-green landscape: mountains and groupings of infinite (无限的) rise and fall between cloudless sky and rippling (涟漪的) water.

When the dancers moved elegantly, audiences seemed to be looking at the moving mountains and rivers. “It brings me a pure experience of beauty. It is not only a drama but also an exhibition. Vast mountains and rivers are coming to life!” Internet user Mo Weisha wrote in a review. “More than a thousand years later, green mountains and rivers still impress people as they did long ago.” Some people even decided to watch the dance again when it was staged in the theaters later. In fact, in recent years, more and more modern shows have featured Chinese traditional culture and received warm welcome. As for the reason, it is due to people’s great love for traditional culture.

“The younger generations have grown up with a more open mind. They accept Chinese culture and are proud of it,” Yao Wei, director of Henan TV Station’s Innovation Center, told China Daily.

8 . Today’s workplaces are more multicultural than ever, and it’s normal to work with people from many different places and backgrounds. This has opened up many new opportunities — but it also creates some challenges.

Cultural differences aren’t just about nationality, race or belief. Many of us work in multi-generational organizations, alongside younger or older colleagues who have cultural references, assumption and attitudes that are very different from our own. All of this means that we need to be better at understanding and operating in a wide variety of cultures. That’s where Cultural Intelligence, or also CQ, the ability to adapt to new cultural settings, comes in.

People with high CQ aren’t experts in every kind of culture. Instead, they have the skills to go into new environments with confidence, and to make informed judgments based on observations and evidence.

These people are good at understanding unfamiliar or ambiguous behaviour. They recognize shared influences among particular groups, and this allows them to identify the impact of a particular culture.

However, they also know that cultural influences are complex and interconnected. And they’re aware that while culture is significant, factors such as business roles and individual personalities can have a powerful effect on behaviour, too.

For example, let’s say you have a meeting with an Italian stockbroker (证券经纪人). Does this person behave the way people do because they’re Italian, because they’re stockbrokers, or because they’re Italian stockbrokers? Or is it because they’re millennials, or introverts? It’s likely a combination of all of these elements (要素), so aim to avoid making assumptions or generalizations based on any single aspect.

Cultural knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to know every detail of a culture. It’s about knowing how that culture in general shapes people’s behaviours, values, and beliefs. When you understand that, individual “rules” of behaviour make much more sense.

10 . This year some twenty-three hundred teenagers from all over the world will spend about ten months in American homes. They will attend American schools, meet American teenagers, and form impressions of the real America. At the same time, about thirteen hundred American teenagers will go to other countries to learn new languages and gain a new understanding of the rest of the world.

Here is a two-way student exchange in action. Fred, nineteen, spent last year in Germany with George’s family. In turn, George’s son Mike spent a year in Fred’s home in America.

Fred, a lively young man, knew little German when he arrived, but after two months’ study, the language began to come to him. School was completely different from what he had expected—much harder. Students rose respectfully when the teacher entered the room. They took fourteen subjects instead of the six that are usual in the United States. There were almost no outside activities.

Family life, too, was different. The father’s word was law, and all activities were around the family rather than the individual. Fred found the food too simple at first. Also, he missed having a car.

“Back home, you pick up some friends in a car and go out and have a good time. In Germany, you walk, but you soon learn to like it.”

At the same time, in America, Mike, a friendly German boy, was also forming his idea. “I suppose I should criticize American schools”, he says. “It is far too easy by our level. But I have to say that I like it very much. In Germany, we do nothing but study. Here we take part in many outside activities. I think that maybe your schools are better in training for citizens. There ought to be some middle ground between the two.”