阅读理解。
Americans wear black for mourning while Chinese wear white. Westerners think of dragons as monsters
while Chinese honor them as symbols of God. Chinese civilization has often shown such polarities (极性)
with the West, as though each stands at extreme ends of a global string. Now in the University of California,
Berkeley, a psychologist has discovered deeper polarities between Chinese and American cultures-polarities
that go to the heart of how we reason and discover truth.
His findings go far toward explaining why American cultures seem to be contentious and Chinese cultures
so passive, when compared to each other. More importantly, the research opens the way for the peoples of
the East and the West to learn from each other in fundamental ways. The Chinese could leam much from
Western methods for determining scientific truth, said Kaiping Peng, a former Beijing scholar, who is now
a UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology. And Americans could profit enormously from the Chinese
tolerance for accepting contradictions in social and personal life, he said.
"Americans have a terrible need to find out who is right in an argument," said Peng. "The problem is that
at the interpersonal level you really don't need to find the truth, or maybe there isn't any." Chinese people, said
Peng, are far more content to think that both sides have flaws and virtues, because they have a holistic (整体
的) awareness that life is full of contradictions. They do far less blaming of the individual than Americans do,
he added.
In studies of interpersonal argument, for example, when subjects were asked to deal with contradictory
information stemming from conflict between a mother and a daughter or a student and a school, Peng found
that Americans were "non-compromising, blaming one side-usually the mother-for the causes of the problems,
demanding changes from one side to attain a solution and offering no compromise" in dealing with the conflict.
Compared to this angry, blaming American stance, the Chinese were paragons (模范) of compromise, finding
fault on both sides and looking for solutions that moved both sides to the middle.
1. In Paragraph l, the author sets examples in order to _____. [ ]
A. expose the contradiction between Chinese and Americans
B. show the differences between Chinese culture and American culture
C. find the reason for the differences
D. generalize the main idea of the passage
2. The underlined word "contentious" in Paragraph 2 probably means _____. [ ]
A. conservative
B. aggressive
C. objective
D. optimistic
3. Compared with Americans, Chinese are _____.[ ]
A. likely to find the truth in life
B. reluctant to admit their own failure
C. reluctant to have a general idea of things
D. likely to know advantages and disadvantages of things
4. The studies show that _____. [ ]
A. an American treats his or her mother badly
B. ideas of treating the aged are different
C. personalities of Chinese and American are different
D. conflicts of Americans and Chinese are different
5. The main idea of the passage is _____. [ ]
A. polarities between American and Chinese culture
B. priorities of American culture to Chinese
C. different attitudes towards the aged
D. different manners m social occasions
