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Americans wear black for mourning while Chinese wear white. Westerners think of dragons as
monsters. Chinese honor them as symbols of God. Chinese civilization has often shown such polarities
(对立) with the West, as though each stands at extreme ends of a global string. Now in the University
if 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 gar toward explaining why American cultures seem to be aggressive 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 basic ways. The Chinese could learn
much from Western methods for determining scientific truth, said Kaiping Peng, a former Beijing Scholar, who is now a UC Berkley assistant professor of psychology. And Americans could profit enormously
from he 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 advantages and disadvantages,
because they have a whole awareness that life is full of contradictions. They do far less blaming of the
individual than do Americans, he added.
In studies of interpersonal argument, for example, when subjects were asked to deal with
contradictory information resulting 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 method, 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 1, 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. Compared with Americans, Chinese are___.
A. likely to find the truth in life
B. unwilling to admit their own failure
C. unwilling to have a general idea of things
D. likely to know advantages and disadvantages of things
3. The studies show___.
A. an American treats his or her mother badly
B. different ideas of treating the aged
C. different personality of Chinese and Americans
D. different conflicts of Americans and Chinese
4.The main idea of the passage is___.
A. polarities between American and Chinese cultures
B. extreme ends of the string
C. different attitudes towards the aged
D. different manners in social occasions