新视野大学英语（第二版）泛读教程2Unit1课文翻译及课前课后答案..doc

UNIT 1 PASSAGE A Polar Differences Between Chinese and American Cultures Americans wear black for mourning. Chinese wear white. Westerners think of dragons as monsters. Chinese honor them as representations of God. The polarities between Chinese civilization and the West often make it seem as though each stands at extreme ends of the earth. Now a University of California, Berkeley, psychologist has discovered deeper polarities between Chinese and American cultures-polarities that go to the heart of how we reason and discover truth. 在丧礼上，美国人穿黑色丧服，而中国人穿白色。西方人认为龙是怪物，而中国人把龙当成神明。中国与西方的文明差异使它们看起来像分别站在地球的极端。最近加利福尼亚的一所大学的心理学家伯克利发现中国和美国文化差异的更深极性，那是关于内心深处的如何理性和发现真理的极性。 His findings go far toward explaining many of the differences between Chinese and American cultures, when compared to each other. More importantly, the research opens the door for the peoples of the East and the West to learn from each other in basic ways. The Chinese would learn 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 from Chinese ways of accepting contradictions in social and personal life. 他的研究结果对于解释许多中美文化对比的差异有很大的贡献。更重要的是，这项研究为东西方民族相互学习的基本途径开启了大门。“中国人从西方方法中学到许多关于如何确定科学真理的知识，”前北京的学者，现为伯克利大学的心理学助理教授的彭开平说，“同时美国人可以从中国式的接受社会和个人生活的矛盾中得到启示。” “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 good and bad points, because they have a holistic understanding that life is full of contradiction. They do far less blaming of the individual than Americans do, he added. “美国人迫切地要找出谁是一场辩论中正确的人，”彭说。“但问题是在人际关系方面，你真的不需要找到确切的真相，或者根本就没有所谓的真相。”彭说，“中国人对一件事物有一个较为全面的了解，认为生命是充满了矛盾的，因此认为凡事都有好坏两面。他们一般会比美国人更少去指责一个个体的错误。”他补充说。 In studies of interperso