To Shake or Not To Shake Hands
As we emerge from the pandemic (大流行病), we’re starting to see the return of an age-old custom: the handshake. Many of us went
Not everyone is happy that the handshake is making its way back.
“It’s never been safe,” said Dr. Gregory Poland, a Mayo Clinic physician and professor. “Handshaking carries the risk of transmitting a host of undesirable conditions,” Poland said. Handshaking
“It’s unfortunate that we needed a pandemic to shake some sense into people on how disease is transmitted,” said Dr. Mark Sklansky, who’s worried that the opportunity
Shaking hands as a symbol of friendship and trust
Sklansky is convinced that even long-held cultural customs can change over time if we realize
2 . Koko the gorilla knew over 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, and used them to do everything from asking for food to joking around. Her trainer and long-term companion, Penny Patterson, thought Koko went further still, signing in novel ways and showing complex emotions. According to Ms Patterson, when a cat that Koko loved was killed in an accident, Koko signed: “Cat, cry, have-sorry, Koko-love.” When Koko died last month, some of her obituaries (讣告) mourned the gorilla who had “mastered American sign language.”
Then came the backlash, from linguists and experts in sign languages. Sign languages have complex grammars, equivalent to spoken tongues in expressiveness. Koko’s ability, it was pointed out, fell well short of a fluent human signer. Moreover, Ms Patterson was her interpreter, a role that invited the question of how much she was inferring what Koko “must have meant,” and explaining away random signs. It was hard to be sure: Ms Patterson preferred speaking to journalists over sharing her video and raw data about Koko with fellow researchers.
There is no doubt that animals communicate. Animals from one region can share sounds that differ from groups in another, leading researchers to talk of animal “dialects.” Then there are the remarkable achievements of Koko and her primate predecessors, including a chimp delightfully named Nim Chimpsky. Yet there is an important distinction between communication and language. Take the misleading term “body language.” It is sometimes claimed that words convey just 7% of meaning, and that body language and tone of voice do the rest. This wildly overstretches an old study which found that most emotional messaging — as opposed to the propositional kind — comes from tone and body language, especially when a neutral word such as “maybe” was used. But try conveying a fact like “It will rain on Tuesday” with your eyebrows, and the difference becomes clear. Language allows for clear statements, questions and commands.
Nim Chimpsky’s near-namesake, Noam Chomsky, has argued that people have a kind of “universal grammar”, and that all humankind’s languages are mere variations on a theme. Mr Chomsky has changed his mind repeatedly on what constitutes the core of human language, but one obvious candidate is syntax — rules, not just words, which allow the construction of a huge variety of meaningful utterances (所说的话). This capacity may even be infinite. Any statement in English, for example, can be made longer by adding “He said that …” at the beginning. This property is called recursion: a simple statement (“It’s cold”) is embedded in a more complicated one (“He said that it’s cold”). Human syntax also allows for hypotheticals (“If she hadn’t arrived …”), talking precisely about events distant from the present, and so much more.
That gorillas lack syntax should not blind humans to their magnificence. But the fact that Koko could communicate should not mislead observers into thinking she possessed language.
1. Which statement about KOKO the gorilla is true?| A．Koko’s ability was similar to a fluent human signer. |
| B．Koko could ask for food using sign language. |
| C．Koko was able to show complex feelings using sign language. |
| D．Koko was killed in an accident. |
| A．approval | B．bias | C．opposition | D．evidence |
| A．Koko was not as expressive as a human signer |
| B．Koko seldom needed an interpreter |
| C．Koko was able to communicate with journalists |
| D．Koko failed to speak several animal “dialects” |
| A．Humans can express past events using language while apes cannot. |
| B．Tone and body language play a dominant role in human communication. |
| C．Words enable humans to convey clear meanings. |
| D．Gorillas are still magnificent in terms of their ability to communicate. |
1.
| A．How to perform better in a job interview. |
| B．Who is more qualified for the position. |
| C．How to work well in stressful situations. |
| D．What are confident behaviors in an interview. |
| A．By observing his or her body language. |
| B．By asking him or her some questions. |
| C．By creating some stressful situations |
| D．By learning his or her academic background. |
| A．She's nervous. | B．She's shy |
| C．She's smart. | D．She's talkative. |
| A．Brainpower. | B．Confidence. |
| C．Experience. | D．Academic background |
4 . A Universal Greeting: Shaking Hands
A handshake seems to be a normal gesture. In fact, in the 9th century BC, an ancient site during the ruling of Shalmaneser III clearly shows two figures holding hands.The Iliad,usually dated to the 8th century BC, mentions that two characters “taking each other's hands and expressing their loyalty," Centuries later, Shakespeare once wrote of two characters who shook hands and swore to be brothers in the bookAs You Like It.Shaking hands seems to be an ancient custom whose roots have disappeared in the sands of time.
Historians who have studied ancient etiquette books note that the modern handshake did not appear until the middle of the 19th century, when it was considered a slightly inappropriate gesture that could only be used between friends. But what if Shakespeare had written about handshaking hundreds of years earlier?
According to author Torbjorn Lundmark in hisTales of Hi and Bye: Greeting and Parting Rituals Around the World,the problem comes in differing definitions of the handshake. The early handshakes mentioned above were part of making deals or peace; King Shalmaneser 111 referred to a rebellion in which he signed a treaty with the King of Babylon. In theIliad,Diomedes and Glaucus shook, hands when they realized they were guest-friends, and Diomedes declared: "Let's not try to kill each other." Shakespeare was similarly referencing settlement of a conflict.
The modern handshake as a form of greeting is harder to trace. As a Dutch sociologist Herman Roodenburg — the chief authority for the history of handshaking — wrote in a chapter of ananthologycalledA Cultural History of Gesture,“More than in any other field, that of the study of gesture is one in which the historian has to make the most of only a few clues”.
One of the earliest clues he cites is a 16th-century German translation of the French writer Rabelais'sGargantua and Pantagruel.When one character meets Gargantua, Rabelais writes, “He was greeted by countless hugs and countless good days." But according to Roodenburg, the 16th-century German translation added references to shaking hands.
A popular saying suggests that Cleland's statements against bowing were actually a wish to go back to a potentially traditional method of greeting in Europe. As the centuries progressed, handshaking was replaced by more hierarchical ways of greeting — like bowing. According to Roodenburg, handshaking survived in a few remote places, like in Dutch towns where some would use the gesture to make peace after disagreements. Around the same time, those who valued equality also made use of handshaking. Then, as the Continent's hierarchy was weakened, handshaking became a common practice among people of the same rank, as it is today.
1. Why does the author mention Shakespeare in the first two paragraphs?| A．To prove that the history of handshaking is hard to find. |
| B．To illustrate that handshaking is a very old custom. |
| C．To show readers that handshaking is common in fiction. |
| D．To explain the value of handshaking in communication. |
| A．The origin of handshaking as a form of greeting is easy to trace. |
| B．Citizens usually shake hands to show friendliness in Holland. |
| C．It was used only between friends and to reach an agreement. |
| D．It is a common practice between people of different social positions. |
| A．the science of mental ability | B．a collection of selected literary passages |
| C．a daily written record of experiences | D．all the living things of a particular region |
| A．The handshake has disappeared in some remote parts of the Netherlands. |
| B．Handshaking has different meanings in different European countries. |
| C．Most Europeans prefer to shake hands rather than bow. |
| D．Handshakes are now common between people of different positions. |
5 . Nonverbal communication is the process of sending and receiving messages without using words, either spoken or written. Similar to the way that italicizing (斜体) emphasizes written language, nonverbal behavior may emphasize parts of a verbal message.
Psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (1969), in discussing the interdependence that exists between nonverbal and verbal messages, identified six important ways that nonverbal communication directly affects our verbal messages. First, we can use nonverbal signals to emphasize our words.
| A．Finally, nonverbal communication itself carries the impact of a message. |
| B．Finally, we can use nonverbal signals to add to the verbal content of our message. |
| C．Nonverbal messages have been recognized for centuries as a critical aspect of communication. |
| D．All good speakers know how to do this with forceful gestures, changes in vocal volume or speech rate, deliberate pauses, and so on. |
| E．Called turn-taking signals, these gestures and vocalizations (发声) make it possible for us to alternate the conversational roles of speaking and listening. |
| F．The term was introduced in 1956 in the book “Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations”. |
1.
| A．More cheerful. | B．Less stressed. | C．More resolute. | D．Less attractive. |
| A．To find out how clothes can affect people’s feelings. |
| B．To show how scientists pay more attention to details. |
| C．To prove people make fewer mistakes in lab coats. |
| D．To test the effect of clothes on people’s attention. |
| A．Body movements change the way people think. |
| B．How people dress can change their appearance. |
| C．What people wear can affect their performance. |
| D．People doing different jobs wear different clothes. |
7 . Frederic Mishkin, who’s been a professor at Columbia Business School for almost 30 years, is good at solving problems and expressing ideas. Whether he’s standing in front of a lecture hall or engaged in a casual conversation, his hands are always waving and pointing. When he was in graduate school, one of his professors was so annoyed by this constant gesturing that he made the young economist sit on his hands whenever he visited the professor’s office.
It turns out, however, that Mishkin’s professor had it exactly wrong. Gesture doesn’t prevent but promotes clear thought and speech. Research demonstrates that the movements we make with our hands when we talk form a kind of second language, adding information that’s absent from our words. It’s learning’s secret code: Gesture reveals what we know. It reveals what we don’t know. What’s more, the agreement (or lack of agreement) between what our voices say and how our hands move offers a clue to our readiness to learn.
Many of the studies establishing the importance of gesture to learning have been conducted by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. “We change our minds by moving our hands,” writes Goldin-Meadow in a review of this work. Particularly significant are what she calls “mismatches” between oral expression and physical gestures. A student might say that a heavier ball falls faster than a light one, for example, but make a gesture indicating that they fall at the same rate, which is correct. Such differences indicate that we’re moving from one level of understanding to another. The thoughts expressed by hand motions are often our newest and most advanced ideas about the problem we’re working on; we can’t yet absorb these concepts into language, but we can capture them in movement.
Goldin-Meadow’s more recent work strews not only that gesture shows our readiness to learn, but that it actually helps to bring learning about. It does so in two ways. First, it elicits (引出) helpful behavior from others around us. Goldin-Meadow has found that adults respond to children’s speech-gesture mismatches by adjusting their way of instruction. Parents and teachers apparently receive the signal that children are ready to learn, and they act on it by offering a greater variety of problem-solving techniques. The act of gesturing itself also seems to quicken learning, bringing new knowledge into consciousness and aiding the understanding of new concepts. A 2007 study by Susan Wagner Cook, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, reported that third-graders who were asked to gesture while learning algebra (代数) were nearly three times more likely to remember what they’d learned than classmates who did not gesture.
1. According to Paragraph 1, Frederic Mishkin was asked to sit on his hands because ________.| A．he could litter express his ideas that way |
| B．he always pointed his finger at his professor |
| C．his professor did not like his gesturing |
| D．his gestures prevented his professor from thinking |
| A．It draws tasteful responses from others and increases learning speed. |
| B．It promotes second language learning and quickens thinking. |
| C．It provides significant clues for solving academic problems. |
| D．It reduces students’ reliance on teachers’ instruction. |
| A．They can stimulate our creativity. |
| B．Instructors should make full use of them. |
| C．Teachers can hardly explain new concepts without them. |
| D．They serve as a stepping stone to solving real life problems. |
| A．Hand Motions, a Second Language |
| B．Gesturing: Signal of Understanding |
| C．New Uses of Gesturing |
| D．The Secret Code of Learning |
