2011年英语专业八级真题解析.pdf

2011年专八真题详解（新题型优化）PART I LISTENING COMPREHENSION SECTION A . Classifications of Cultures Good morning, everyone. Today well look at culture or rather classifications of cultures. Usually when we deal with different people, we deal with them as if we were all members of the same culture. However, its possible that people from different cultures have different assumptions about the world, regarding such important and basic ideas as time, personal space. And this is the view of Edward Hall. And Edward Hall is an anthropologist who spent a large part of his life studying American Indians, their culture, their language, but he was different from a lot of other anthropologists who just study one culture. He was interested in the relations between cultures, how cultures interact. What Hall believes is that cultures can be classified by placing them on a continuum, ranging from what he called high-context to low-context. OK, r1 lwhat is a high-context culture? 2A hi h-context culture is a culture in which the context of the messa e or the action or an event carries a lar e art of its meanin and si nificance. 3What this means is that in. a hi h-context culture more attention is aid to what has been in and around the messa e than to the message itself. Now let me give you examples. First in terms of personal space, generally speaking, in a high-context culture, because theres greater dependency on group thinking, 4people lean towards heavier senso involvement or closeness to eo le. 5And the have less res ect for rivac for ersonal 叩If you go into that culture, people might stand closer when theyre talking to you. They might touch more and if theyre jostled in a crowd, they wont feel violated. 6And also people from a high-context culture pay attention to body language. Because remember what I said, 2the defi 皿tion of a high-context culture is that more attention is aid to the context of the messa e than to the messa e itself, and part of the context is body language. Second, in terms of time, 7 eo le in hi h-context cultures are considered to have what is called a ol chronic attitude toward time. Here ol means multi le and chronic means time. What this means is that they believe people, things, events have their own time and there cant be a standard system of time for everything. What this leads them to believe is that 8you cant emphasize punctuality. Things happen when they are supposed to happen. So theres a different attitude toward time. There is no set standard of time. You cant control time. Everything has its own sense of time. So its a culture that pays little attention to time, to clock time. Now, lets move on to low-context culture. A low-context culture is just the opposite. 9A low-context culture is one in which the messa e the event or the action is a se arate enti havin meanin onto itself re ardless of the surroundin s or the context. That the messa e the event the action has meanin in itself. So what this means in a low-context culture is that people pay more attention to the event itself rather than to the context which surrounds the event or the message. For example, in terms of personal space again. Theres more emphasis on individuality, so the concept of privacy is very very important, or as ,. before as I said, in a high-context culture they might not even be concerned with privacy or personal space. But in a low-context culture, theres a feeling that we each have our own personal space. If you get too close, if you dont knock on doors before entering, thats an invasion of privacy; people feel violated. Theres a respect and a desire for privacy, lOand ou also see that eo le mi ht a less attention to body language because as I said the message is, the message is everything. llThey are not going to wor-about all the details around it. What ou sa is the im ortant thin or what ou do is the im ortant 也 Another example of a low-context culture is peoples attitude towards, time. In terms of time, I said before there was a polychronic sense of time in a high-context culture. What do you think there would be in a low-context culture? Monochronic! Right! 12A monochronic sense of time and b that we mean that 专八201 1 - 1 1 there is one time. And that concept means that people in a low-context culture believe that theres one standard of time and that should be for everything. And so Im not willing to hear Oh, the traffic was heavy. Thats why I am late. or Oh, I slept late. 13Peo le in a low-context culture wotild be much more u set with lateness because the feel that eve one should follow the same timethere shouldnt be all this flexibili with time and the e ect unctuali . And 14 they look at time as almost a commodity that they use expressions like use time, to waste time, to spend time or time is money. All of these expressions reinforce the concept that time is actually something you can hold onto. So what this is all about is that Hall stresses that people need to be aware of these different assumptions or co。