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  3. Every culture attempts to create a “universe of discourse” for its members, a way in which people can interpret their experience

Every culture attempts to create a “universe of discourse” for its members, a way in which people can interpret their experience

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问题     Every culture attempts to create a “universe of discourse” for its members, a way in which people can interpret their experience and convey it to one another. Without a common system of codifying sensations, life would be absurd and all efforts to share meanings doomed to failure. This universe of discourse — one of the most precious of all cultural legacies — is transmitted to each generation in part consciously and in part unconsciously. Parents and teachers give explicit instruction in it by praising or criticizing certain ways of dressing, of thinking, of gesturing, of responding to the acts of others. But the most significant aspects of any cultural code may be conveyed implicitly, not by rule or lesson but through modeling behavior. A child is surrounded by others who, through the mere consistency of their actions as males and females, mothers and fathers, salesclerks and policemen, display what is appropriate behavior. Thus the grammar of any culture is sent and received largely unconsciously, making one’s own cultural assumptions and biases difficult to recognize. They seem so obviously right that they require no explanation.
    In The Open and Closed Mind, Milton Rokeach poses the problem of cultural understanding in its simplest form, but one that can readily demonstrate the complication of communication between cultures. It is called the “Denny Doodlebug Problem”. Readers are given all the rules that govern this culture: Denny is an animal that always faces North, and can move only by jumping; he can jump large distances or small distances, but can change direction only after jumping four times in any direction; he can jump North, South, East or West, but not diagonally. Upon concluding a jump his master places some food three feet directly west of him. Surveying the situation, Denny concludes he must jump four times to reach the food. No more or less. And he is right. All the reader has to do is to explain the circumstances that make his conclusion correct.
    The large majority of people who attempt this problem fail to solve it, despite the fact that they are given all the rules that control behavior in this culture. If there is difficulty in getting inside the simplistic world of Denny Doodlebug — where the cultural code has already been broken and handed to us — imagine the complexity of comprehending behavior in societies whose codes have not yet been deciphered, and where even those who obey these codes are only vaguely aware and can rarely describe the underlying sources of their own actions.
It can be inferred from the passage that
选项 A、in some societies, people’s behaviors are not governed by cultural codes.
B、there are societies whose cultural codes still remain a mystery to us.
C、once people accept a cultural code, they’ll have a full understanding of their behavior.
D、The Open and Closed Mind exerts great impact on people’s behavior.
答案B
解析 推理判断题。在文章最后，破折号后面的定语从句提到：societies whose codes have not yet been deciphered(deciphered意为“译解”)，这就说明有的社会的文化准则对我们来说仍不可知。所以[B]项正确。[A]项显然与原文内容不符，原文提到，每个社会都有自己的文化规则，人们的行为都受到文化规则的影响。[C]项内容与文章结尾句相悖，即便是遵守某种文化规则的人，对文化规则也不是完全理解。[D]项提到 The Open and Closed Mind这本书，而文章只是用它来举例，并没有提到它对人们产生的影响。
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