Homework

SELECTION 1: THE GREEN BANANA

Summary:

The title “Green Banana” is meaningful. First, the green bananas are used as something to stop the leak of the jeep temporarily and then as a symbol of the unknown treasures of each civilization. The Green Banana is intended to inspire people to think about people’s responses to the culture that is different from his own. The central idea of the author’s experience is conveyed by his two “learning moment.” The author believes that every nation has good things to offer to the rest of the world. It is therefore wrong to regard any nation as inferior. We should reject ethnocentrism and adopt cultural relativism.

•         The first part of the text is a piece of narrative. Narrative is one kind of writing style. To narrate is to give an account of an event or a series of events. In its broadest sense, narrative writing includes stories, real or imaginary, biographies, histories, news items, and narrative poems. Narration often goes hand in hand with description. When tells a story, one describe its setting and characters. This text opens with the description of the scenery in interior Brazil and then goes ahead with the problem that befalls the author and finally his encounter with the village people. When planning a narrative, the writer should consider these five aspects: setting, selection of detail, organization, point of view and purpose.

Excercise

Finding Context Clues (answer) 

1.      a. had mechanical trouble

2.      b. Friendship

3.      a. the village people

4.      b. Helps one in trouble

5.      a. a high, pointed shape

Discovering Implications (answer)

1.      yes                                                       6. Yes. They were.

2.      yes. Green banana                               7. Yes. It was

3.      yes. The people around them              8. No.

4.      No

5.      No

Discovering More Implications (answer)

1.      The Stranger :

a.       -     Traveling in Brasil                                           b. -    apears Portuguese

-          Product of American higher education               -    Travels a

-          Comes from New England                                 -   May be a

2.      The benefactor

a.       -     someone that help the stranger           b. –  a  mechanic

-          Was told ‘green banana’                         -

3.      Village People

a.       -    like Sugar Loaf in Rio                         b. -

-          Knows Green Banana                             -

SELECTION 2 : LEARNING FRENCH

Summary :

The authors share the experience of his time in France and how he studied French language. His first experience when he was invited by Michel Ecole Polytechnique friend, when his friends talked to each other in the French language he felt stupid for not understanding what they said.
The second experience when he went for a walk he went to the cafe with many partners in it. he was interested in their conversation.
One day he went for a walk he saw a girl with red hair standing up and saying 'je vous aimais'. He apparently misunderstood what she was saying. from there the desire to learn french language appears. He followed the special classes at Alliance Francaise using a translator. Three  months later he was able to master the French language. few years later he went up to the Chamonix guides in the French Alps. Claude Jaccoux is one of his closest friends while climbing.

Exercise

Understanding the Critical Incidents (answer)

1.     c. Hold an intelligent conversation in French

2.     b. “please, sir buy a magazine”

Understanding the details (answer)

1.     Scintillating : very clever, amusing, and interesting.

2.     He got off the bus at the station below the Panteon.

3.     Ranging fromtotal noviceto interpreter.

4.     Person forced to leave their country

5.     He was understanding the French directly

6.     making a translation.

SELECTION 3 : YOU HAVE LEFT YOUR LOTUS PODS ON THE BUS

Summary:

Brooks, teaching at Chulalongkorn University, was required as a Fulbright Fellow to attend regular classes in Thai. One day he brought along with him three young men wearing the bright orange-yellow robes of Buddhist monks. They filled into the hotel room in silence and stood in a row as they were presented to me, each one responding by joining his palms together, thumbs touching his chest. As talked Yamyong, the eldest, in his late twenties, explained that he was an ordained monk, while  the other two were novices. Brooks then asked Prasert and Vichai if they would be ordained soon, but the monk answered for them.

            They put down their brown paper parasols and their reticules that bulged with books and fruit. For a while they were busy adjusting the folds of their robes around their shoulders and legs. He spoke of Ceylon; there the monks bought the robes all cut and ready to sew together. Yamyong smiled appreciative. The air-conditioning roared at one end of the room and the noise of boat motors on the river seeped through the windows at the other. Time went on, and we sat there, extending but not altering the subject of conversation. Occasionally he looked around the room. The idea of a Sunday outing is so repellent to him that deciding to take part in this one was to certain extent a compulsive act. Ayudhaya lies less than fifty miles up the Chao Phraya from Bangkok. It was nice, old-fashioned, open bus. Every part of it rattled, and the air from the rice fields blew across us as we pieced together our bits of synthetic conversation. He said that in America there were no buffaloes in the fields, and that was why Brooks was interested in seeing them.

The road stretched ahead, straight as a line in geometry, across the verdant, level land. Paralleling it on its eastern side was a fairly wide canal, here and there choked with patches of enormous pink lotuses. In places the flowers were gone and only the pods remained, thick green disks with the circular seeds embedded in their flesh. At the first stop the bhikkus got out. They came aboard again with mangosteens and lotus pods and insisted on giving us large numbers of each. They huge seeds popped out of the fibrous lotus cakes as though from a punchboard. Ayudhaya was hot, dusty, spread-out, its surrounding terrain strewn with ruins that scarcely showed through the vegetation. The bus’s last stop was still two or three miles from the center of Ayudhaya. But the bhikkus were not hungry. None of them had visited Ayudhaya before, and so they had compiled a list of things they most wanted to see. When we got back to the bus stop, the subject of food arose once again, but the excursion had put the bhikkus into such a state of excitement that they  could not bear to allot time for anything but looking.

Brooks sat beside him on the bus going back to Bangkok. They spoke only now and then. After so many hours of resisting the heat, it was relaxing to sit and feel the relatively cool air that blew in from the rice fields. The driver of the bus was not a believer in cause and effect. He passed trucks with oncoming traffic in full view. Finally, they were in a taxi driving across Bangkok. He would be dropped at his hotel and Brooks would take the three bhikkus on to their wat. In his heread he was still hearing the heartrending cries. He had not been able to give an acceptable answer to Yamyong in his bewilderment about the significance of the necktie, but perhaps he could satisfy his curiosity here. Since neither brooks nor he appeared to have understood, he went on. It was an unconvincing explanation for the grueling  sounds they had heard, but to show him that he believed him. The taxi drew up in front of the hotel and he got out.

SELECTION 4 : A MORAL FOR ANY AGE

Summary :

On may 12, 1946 Louis Alexander Slotin was carrying out an experiment in the laboratories at Los Alamos with seven other man. At Los Alamos, Slotin, then aged thirty-five, was concerned with the assembly of pieces of plutonium, each of which alone is too small to be dangerous. Slotin himself  had tested the assembly of the first experimental bomb which had been exploded in New Mexico in July, 1945.

Slotin apologized to his companions. He saved the lives of the seven men working with him by cutting to a minimum the time during which the assembly of plutonium was giving out neutrons and radioactive rays.and hr died of radiation sickness nine days later.

The author show that morality – shal we call it heroism in this case? – has the same anatomy the world over. The sense of common loyality of charity, and tenderness, the sense of human love. He show Louise  Slotin was an atomic physicst who made a different choice from mine.

SELECTION 5 : NEUTRON WEAPONS

Summary :

            To minimize the horrendous devastation of nuclear warfare, exemplified by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Reagan Administration has decided to produce the neutron warhead, which is designed to release enormous amounts of radiation while inflicting minimal damage to buildings and property in the targeted area. The principal advantage is that the radiation would penetrate enemy tanks and rapidly kill military personnel, as well as anyone else within a radius of about 500 yards. During World War II, The author was a physician on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, and he witnessed the death of a 32-year-old physicist, Dr. Louis Slotin, who had been exposed to radiation during an accident at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories in May, 1946. On the ninth day since the accident, Louis Slotin died. The autopsy findings were the same as those we had seen many times in experimental animals-hemorrhage throughout the body, the absence of platelets, and blood that would not clot. There will be many survivors, both military and civilian, if and when nuclear tactical weapons are used. There is no effective medical treatment for serious radiation injury, and these deaths will be almost as agonizing to those looking on as to the victims themselves. The production of neutron weapons is probably as immoral a concept as human minds have yet devised.

SELECTION 6:

THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA : GETTING READY TO GO

Summary:

            Writing about a country in its own language was a great advantage. Because in other places one was always interpreting and simplifying. Translation created a muffled obliqueness – one was always seeing the country sideways. But language grew out of the landscape  - English out of England - and it seemed logical that the country could be accurately portrayed only in its own language. The problem was one of perspective: How and where to go to get the best view of the place? It was also a problem in tone; after all, I was an alien. The British had invented their own solution to travel-writing. They went to places like Gabon and Paraguay and joked about the discomforts, the natives, the weather, the food, the entertainments. The British, who had devised a kind of envious mockery of other cultures, and who had virtually invented the concept of funny foreigners, had never regarded themselves as fair game for the travel-writer. And then the author had his way; narrowly, around the entire coast. He sees the whole of Britain. He decided on this coastal route for my itinerary. He had his justification for the trip – the journey had the right shape; it had logic; it had a beginning and an end. The greatest advantage in this tour was that a country tended to seep to its coast; it was concentrated there, deposited against its beaches like the tidewrack from the sea. He wanted to look around and see Britain for myself. He did not intend a stunt or a test of strength or a public display. In fact, quite the opposite; and later, tramping the coastal path or riding the slows trains, he sometimes felt like the prince in the old story, who, because he distrusts everything, he has been told and everything he has read, disguises himself in old clothes and, with a bag slung over his back, hikes the muddy roads talking to everyone and looking closely at things, to find out what his kingdom is really like. A season of travelling with my eyes open in Great Britain, he thought, could not fail to show him what was to come. He was little impatient with distant countries and past decades, but he was not necessarily looking for progress or invention. There was a deterioration and decay that seemed to him more futuristic than utopian cities of steel and glass. Then, he knew this was exactly right and that he wanted to leave immediately.

UNIT II : READING INTRODUCTORY TEXTBOOKS

SELECTION 1 :

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY

Summary ;

 8.1 INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTERS OF THE DISTURBING KIND

            (Learning a new culture can be embarrassing) The grateful Latin American student, hoping to express his appreciation to his teacher for her efforts to improve his English. (maddening) The Japanese hosts to a group of North American teacher/students arranged for their guests to be housed in pairs in the student dormitory on the campus of the university they were visiting in Japan. (and confusing) Abdul Aziz never came to class on Friday afternoon. As result, he often missed tests, which were scheduled for the end of the week. When his teacher pointed out, that the seeds of failure lay in these absences.  This vignettes of cross-cultural encounters illustrate not only the perils of unwarranted cultural assumptions as to what is translatable, what is frightening and what is not, and where priorities lie, but also the pain of learning the hard way. Cultural learning, or understanding the new ways of another group (or even one’s own), is very like looking into a shadowed mirror. First, however, we must come to terms with some important concepts.

8.2 COMING TERMS

            Several fundamental concepts in the nature of culture learning. These include: acculturation/enculturation, cross-cultural awareness, cultural identity, cultural patterns, themes, and postulates.

Acculturation/Enculturation

Culture learning is a natural process in which human beings internalize the knowledge needed to function in a societal group. Enculturation builds a sense of cultural or social identity, a network of values and beliefs, patterned ways of living, and, for the most part, ethnocentrism, or belief in the power and the rightness of native ways. Acculturation involves the process of pulling out the world view or ethos of the first culture, learning new ways of meeting old problems, and shedding ethnocentric evaluations.

Cross-cultural Awareness

Cross-cultural Awareness involves uncovering and understanding one’s own culturally conditioned behavior and thinking, as well as the patterns of others.

Cultural Identity

Cultural identity refers to the relationship between the individual and society. Identity is a social process in which one balances what s/he thinks oneself to be and what others believe that one to be.

Cultural Patterns, Themes, and Postulates

The term cultural patterns, as used in anthropological and sociological literature, describes the systematic and often repetitive nature of human behavior, interaction, and organization.

SELECTION 2: BIOLOGY : EVOLUTION

Summary:

            Evolutionary change in a species depends on (1) the existence of genetic variability among the individuals in the species, which leads to (2) differential reproductive success among them. Mutation provides the basis for genotypic variability. Sexual reproduction creates new gene combinations by (1) crossing over, (2) random assortment of homologous chromosomes, and (3) out breeding. All the genes present in a population constitute its gene pool. In large, randomly breeding populations, the frequency of each gene in the gene pool remains constant (Hardy-Wein-berg law). Populations produce more young than the number which would replace the parental population. If, as is usually the case, the environment already is supporting as large a population as it can, the offspring will be subjected to a “struggle for existence”. Any gene or gene combination that increases the likelihood that an individual will (1) survive to sexual maturity, (2) mate, and (3) rise larger families will be favored. This is natural selection. In addition, the gene pool of a population can be altered by (1) migration of genes from other populations into it and (2) sampling errors when the population is small (drift). Behavior that leads to the death of an individual may nonetheless be selected for if that behavior promotes the welfare of close relatives of the victim (kin selection). Natural selection may affect the distribution of phenotypes in a population in three ways: (1) stabilizing selection – in which individuals at each extreme are selected against: (2) directional selection – in which individuals at one extreme are selected for while those at the other extreme are selected against: (3) disruptive selection – in which individuals at both extremes are favored over those near the mean. Speciation is the formation of one or more descendant species from a single ancestral species. In most, if not all, cases it requires that the ancestral species become separated into two or more geographically isolated sub populations upon which natural selection and/or drift act differently to form distinctive gene pools. If and when two incipient species become reunited, they may resume interbreeding and reform a single gene pool. Alternatively, one or more isolating mechanisms may prevent successful interbreeding. In the latter case, intense competition between them is likely to promote directional selection which reduces the intensity of the competition. Ultimately, a time is reached when the two new species are generally incapable of successful interbreeding. Speciation is complete.

SELECTION 3:

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR FIELD

Summary:

A SCIENTIFIC METHOD

            The scientific method of studying organizational behavior and implementing its principles in the workplace is a fairly natural part of the job for many managers. “Systematically” is the key word. The fact that some managerial performance records are better than others can often be explained by the successful managers application of the scientific method as compared with their less successful counterparts tendency to “wing it”. Essentially it is a four-stage procedure: (1) Observing facts about the real-world behavior of individuals, groups, and organizations, (2) Formulating  explanations of these phenomena through the inductive process, (3) Making the predictions  and hypotheses about the real-world phenomena through the deductive process, (4) Verifying the predictions and hypotheses by means of systematic controlled experiments.

MANAGERS IN ACTION (The Scientific Method in Performance Appraisal )

            Jodi Rose is a manager of the High-Tech Unit of Carbondale Research Institute. Among her responsibilities is a first-year performance evaluation of all new employees in the unit. Then she draws some conclusions about how effective their overall performance has been. Based on these conclusions regarding past performance, Jodi goes on to predict how well each new employee will perform in the future and to plan specific career-development programs for each of them. Jodi follows the same data-gathering and measuring procedure during the subsequent year to verify the accuracy of her predictions and the effectiveness of her development prescriptions.

SELECTION 4:

THE EYE, THE BRAIN, AND THE COMPUTER: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Summary:

            Intelligence is more an open collection of attributes than it is a single well-defined entity. Some of the attributes most closely identified with intelligence are learning, reasoning, understanding, linguistic competence, purposeful behavior, and effective interaction with the environment (including perception). Differ mainly in the assumed definition of intelligence are not necessarily in conflict, but often differ mainly in the assumed definition of intelligence as either (1) a natural phenomenon appearing in living organisms, especially man, or (2) an arbitrarily specified set of abilities. Most psychological  theories of intelligence are what might be called “performance theories” since they are based on measurements of performance in specified skills, and make assertions about the relationships and correlations between different tests of performance. It is possible to assume that most intelligent behavior arises from one of two distinct paradigms (strategies): In the sequential (or logical) paradigm, a single path is found which links available knowledge and evidence to some desired conclusion; in the parallel (gestalt) paradigm, all connections between evidence and possible conclusions are appraised simultaneously. A key insight provided by work in artificial intelligence is that intelligent behavior not only requires stored knowledge and methods for manipulating this knowledge, but is critically dependent on the relationship between the specific encoding of the knowledge and the purpose for which this knowledge is used.

SELECTION 5:

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT AND THE SOCIAL FABRIC AFTER NUCLEAR WAR

Summary :

            There is no doubt that the international catastrophe of large-scale nuclear war would be of unmatched damage to the target states and to their near neighbors, worse than any famine, war, or pestilence, yet witnessed. No mere local events, like volcanos, floods, or earthquakes, compare at all with its continental scope, or its foreseeable 100 or 200 million deaths. For the physical effects on the world as a whole, it seems prudent to say that another factor of 10 beyond a 10-thousand megaton exchange would imply very damaging worldwide effects indeed to the human species and to its environment, not excluding the near extinction of our kind. On the present yield scale, we are at risk of the unknown. We have no prudent safety factors left for events that have so universal an impact. No other such danger to public health has ever come so close to the foreseeable margin. At the same time it is not possible to point to sure worldwide disaster from a great power nuclear exchange on present scale, though indeed there would be intense suffering everywhere, eventual deaths by the tens of millions, and above all, a desperate gamble for our entire species.

SELECTION 4: THE SOCIETY OF MIND

Summary:

NOVELISTS AND REDUCTIONISTS

            Those people who prefer to build on old ideas, and “Novelists” the ones who like to champion new hypotheses. Reductionists are usually right – at least at science’s cautious core, where novelties rarely survive for long. Outside that realm, though, novelists reign, since older ideas have had more time to show their flaws. Many scientists look on chemistry and physics as ideal models of what psychology should be like. After all, the atoms in the brain are subject to the same all-inclusive physical laws that govern every other form of matter. It is not a matter of different laws, but of additional  kinds of theories and principles that operate at higher levels or organization. Our ideas of how Builder works as an agency need not, and must not, conflict with our knowledge of how Builder’s lower-level agents work.

PARTS AND WHOLE

            Those questions about arts, traits, and styles of life are actually quite technical. They ask us to explain what happens among the agents in our minds. But this is a subject about which we have never learned very much – and neither have our sciences. Such questions will be answered in time. But it will just prolong the wait if we keep using pseudo-explanation words like “holistic” and “gestalt”. True, sometimes giving names to things can help by leading us to focus on some mystery. It’s harmful, though, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close.

ARE PEOPLE MACHINES

            Many people feel offended when their minds are likened to computer programs or machines. For centuries, words like “mechanical” made us think of simple devices like pulleys; levers, locomotives, and typewriters. Present-day computers represent an intermediate degree of complexity; they now have millions of parts, and people already are building billion-part computers  for research on Artificial Intelligence. The term “machine” no longer takes us far enough. But rhetoric won’t settle anything. Let’s put these arguments aside  and try instead to understand what the vast, unknown mechanisms of the brain may do. Then we’ll find more self-respect in knowing what wonderful machines we are.

Extensive reading

(summary)

BY:

HELNY F. LONTENG

10 314 455

A CLASS

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

Manado State University

2012