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Look through the article and find one sentence in each paragraph which reflects the contents of the text.

ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

UNIT 3 Socio-cultural Factors in Life-Span Development

READING 1

1. What do you know about socio-cultural factors in life-span development?(orally)

Look through the article and find one sentence in each paragraph which reflects the contents of the text.

THE HUMAN SPECIES IS A CULTURE MAKING SPECIES

Unlike all other animal species, which evolve in blind response to random changes in their environment, humans have considerable control over their own evolution. We change today primarily through cultural evolution. For example, we've made some astonishing accomplishments in the past 10,000 years or so, ever since we developed language. Biological (Darwinian) evolution continues in our species, but its rate, compared with cultural evolution, is so slow that its impact seems almost negligible. There is no evidence, for example, that brain size or structure has changed since Homo sapiens first appeared on the fossil record about 50,000 years ago.

As humans evolved, we acquired knowledge and passed it on from generation to generation. This knowledge, which originally instructed us in how to hunt, make tools, and communicate, became our culture. The accumulation of knowledge has gathered speed – from a slow swell to a meteoric rise. Hunter-gatherer tribes, characteristic of early human society, changed over thousands of years into small agricultural communities. With people rooted in one place, cities grew and flourished. Life within those cities remained relatively unchanged for generations. Then industrialization put a dizzying speed on cultural change. Now technological advances in communication and transportation – computers, FAX machines – transform everyday life at a staggering pace.

Whatever one generation learns, it can pass to the next through writing, word of mouth, ritual, tradition, and a host of other methods humans have developed to assure their culture's continuity. By creating cultures, humans have built, shaped, and carved out their own environments. The human species is no longer primarily at nature's mercy. Rather, humans are capable of changing their environment to fit their needs.

 

But how much can humans influence the environment? Man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific identity. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of identity, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter. Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man’s consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess. But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the identity) of his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them. He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow. (The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a man’s choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.)




Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1157


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