考研英语阅读理解培训.doc

一、考研英语阅读理解基础提高14篇 Text 1 What Is Culture? 1 . The word “culture” has many different meanings. For example, we sometimes say that people who know about art, music, and literature are cultured. However, the word “culture” has different meaning for anthropologists (people who study humankind). To an anthropologist the word “culture” means all the ways in which a group of people act, dress, think, and feel. People have to learn the cultural ways of their community: they are not something that the people in the group are born with. 2. Instinctive behavior, on the other hand, is a pattern of behavior that an animal is born with. Spiders’ spinning their webs is an example of instinctive behavior. The mother spider spinning their webs is an example of instinctive behavior. The mother spider does not teach her babies how to spin webs. (In fact, she is not even there when they are born.) They know how to do it when they are born. This is what we mean by instinctive behavior. 3. As human, we learn some of the ways of our culture by being taught by our teachers or parents. We learn more of the ways of our culture by growing up in it. We see how other people in our culture do things, and we do them in the same way. We even learn how to think and feel in this way. 4. All human beings have certain basic needs, such as eating, drinking, keeping warm and dry, and so on. However, the way in which they take care of these needs depends on the culture in which they grow up. All cultures have ways of eating, drinking, dressing, finding shelter, marrying, and dealing with death. The foods that we think are good to eat, the kinds of clothes we wear, and how many people we can marry at one time are all parts of our culture. 5. Our own culture seems very natural to us. We feel in our hearts that the way that we do things is the only right way to do them. Other people’s cultures often make us laugh or feel disgusted or shocked. We may laugh at clothing that seems ridiculous to us. Many peopl