Culture involves at least three components: what people think, what they do, and the material products they produce. Thus, mental processes, beliefs, knowledge, and values are parts of culture. Some anthropologists would define culture entirely as mental rules guiding behavior, although often wide divergence exists between the acknowledged rules for correct behavior and what people actually do. Consequently, some researchers pay most attention to human behavior and its material products. Culture also has several properties: it is shared, learned, symbolic, transmitted cross-generationally, adaptive, and integrated.
The shared aspect of culture means that it is a social phenomenon; idiosyncratic behavior is not cultural. Culture is learned, not biologically inherited, and involves arbitrarily assigned, symbolic meanings. For example, Americans are not born knowing that the color white means purity, and indeed this is not a universal cultural symbol. The human ability to assign arbitrary meaning to any object, behavior or condition makes people enormously creative and readily distinguishes culture from animal behavior. People can teach animals to respond to cultural symbols, but animals do not create their own symbols. Furthermore, animals have the capability of limited tool manufacture and use, but human tool use is extensive enough to rank as qualitatively different and human tools often carry heavy symbolic meanings. The symbolic element of human language, especially speech, is again a vast qualitative expansion over animal communication systems. Speech is infinitely more productive and allows people to communicate about things that are remote in time and space.
The cross-generational aspect of culture is indicated by the fact that individuals are born into and are shaped by a preexisting culture that continues to exist after they die. Kroeber and White argued that the influence that specific individuals might have over culture would itself be largely determined by culture. Thus, in a sense, culture exists as a different order of phenomena that can best be explained in terms of itself.
Some researchers believe that such an extreme interpretation of culture is a dehumanizing denial of "free will," the human ability to create and change culture. They would argue that culture is merely an abstraction, not a real entity. This is a serious issue because treating culture as an abstraction may lead one to deny the basic human rights of small-scale societies and ethnic minorities to maintain their cultural heritage in the face of threats from dominant societies.
1. The word "culture" has many different meanings. For example, we sometimes say that people who know about art, music, and literature are cultured. However, the word culture has a different meaning for anthropologists (people who study humankind). To an anthropologist the word culture means all the ways in which a group of people act, dress, think, and feel. People have to learn the cultural ways of their community: they are not something that the people in the group are born with.
2. Instinctive behaviour, on the other hand, is a pattern of behaviour that an animal is born with. Spiders spinning their webs is an example of instinctive behaviour. The mother spider does not teach her babies how to spin webs. (In fact, she is not even there when they are born.) They know how to do it when they are born. This is what we mean by instinctive behaviour.
3. As humans, we learn some of the ways of our culture by being taught by our teachers or parents. We learn more of the ways of our culture by growing up in it. We see how other people in our culture do things, and we do them the same way. We even learn how to think and feel in this way.
来源：(http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_50e8cdaf0100c02s.html) - 『What Is Culture? 』_JessicaLee_新浪博客
4. All human beings have certain basic needs, such as eating, drinking, keeping warm and dry, and so on. However, the way in which they take care of these needs depends on the culture in which they grow up. All cultures have ways of eating, drinking, dressing, finding shelter, marrying, and dealing with death. The foods that we think are good to eat, the kinds of clothes we wear, and how many people we can marry at one time are all parts of our culture.
5. Our own culture seems very natural to us. We feel in our hearts that the way that we do things is the only right way to do them. Other people's cultures often make us laugh or feel disgusted or shocked. We may laugh at clothing that seems ridiculous to us. Many people think that eating octopus or a juicy red piece of roast beef is disgusting. The idea that a man can have more than one wife or that brothers and sisters can marry each other may shock other cultures.
6. Ideas of what is beautiful differ from one culture to another. The Flathead Indians of North America used to bind the heads of babies between boards so they would have long sloping foreheads. In the Flathead culture, long sloping foreheads were beautiful. Other cultures might think that they are strange-looking and unattractive. Many people cut scars into their bodies or tattoo themselves so that others in their culture will think they are beautiful. Objects are inserted in holes in the nose, lips, and ears in a number of different cultures. In many twentieth-century societies, rouge, lipstick, eye shadow, perfume, and hair spray are all used to increase attractiveness.
7. When people die, different cultures dispose of their bodies in different ways. Sometimes bodies are burned. Sometimes bodies are buried in the ground. In many cultures in the past, people were buried with food, weapons, jewellery, and other things that might be useful in the next life. For example, the ancient Egyptians buried people with little human figures made from clay. These clay figures were supposed to work for the dead person in the other world. A religious group called the Parses exposed their dead on platforms for birds to eat. Some people practice a second burial. After the bodies have been in the earth for several years, the bones are dug up and reburied, sometimes in a small container.
8. These are just a few of the many different customs that are found in different cultures. Most of the time, the different ways that are the customs of different cultures are neither right nor wrong. It is simply that different people do the same things in different ways.
国际站运营专员面试会问哪些问题
精锐英语老师回答:
很早的时候做过电商,接触过阿里巴巴国际站.国际站里面的全部都是英文,不懂英语的有点吃力!但是你可以去一个一个关键词敲到翻译软件中,再放进去,问题不是很大.可能那个最后面的描述需要找懂英语的人翻译进去了.
①首先，要问专业问题咯。会不会操作呀？会不会上传维护产品链接？如何处理询盘？知不知道处理订单的流程？甚至会问一些比较细的单证问题和物流问题。还有可能会问一些客户问题处理方法。
②其次要考察英语了。一般会问英语咋样。极少部分公司会很严，会叫个人来和你英语会话。毕竟国际站会遇到电话沟通客户的，口语和听力是很重要的。当然一些小公司可能只会要求你达到能读写信函的程度，甚至读写磕磕绊绊中途频繁检索生词。
③最后就是看你适不适合这个公司了。要看你给人家的映像，你的性格特征，和你对入职公司的态度和期许程度，你能不能融入这个团队。这个就对方比较主观的判断了，会直接问你也会旁击侧敲或者全程看你表现的细节。然而，一切都是虚的，终究要看实力。你要是有把握能给公司带来大利益，并且让面试人认可，那要不要入职就你说了算了。
半年经验算入门，可以表现得谦虚，但专业、诚恳、有上进心、有潜力，相信英语过关就能录用的。