한영2-1 중간 3주차 진단고사

All of us are aware of how much money we make, but very few of us know whether we make ①sufficient. That’s because the only way we determine how much is actually “enough” is by comparing ourselves to other people. We make comparisons to other people so ②routinely that we rarely even notice that we are doing so. When a neighbor pulls up in a new car, we don’t typically say to ourselves, “They have an Audi, so I need one, too.” We are more ③cultured and mature than that. We might tell ourselves that our neighbor’s good fortune is none of our business, or that she deserves the new car because of her hard work. If we do have an immediate impulse to keep pace with her, we might ④cherish the thought as soon as it appears. And yet, the next time we get in our own car, we notice just a little more than yesterday how ⑤used the seat is getting. Social comparison is inevitable.

Early human groups almost certainly had a status hierarchy, with some people ranking higher than others. But without the ability to accrue significant amounts of wealth, and with populations numbering in the dozens rather than the thousands, it was simply impossible for the difference between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy to be very big. Like our primate relatives, early humans would have cared deeply about status within their small bands. The natural social structure of early Homo sapiens was a Status Ladder, but it was a very short one.

What changed since then was not human nature. What changed instead was very practical, very concrete, and very recent: Humans invented farming. After a thousand centuries during which hunting and gathering was the only way of life, agriculture appeared a mere hundred centuries ago at more or less the same time in many places around the planet. On an evolutionary time scale, this is a blink of an eye. Suddenly, for the first time, people were able to settle in one place, plant crops, and store the harvest, such as in the form of clay pots full of grain. Humans also began to raise livestock, which, from the herder’s point of view, are walking meat storage devices. Once food could be accumulated in large quantities, it became possible for some people to amass a lot more of it than others. And they did. It was not long before cities sprang up in places like Egypt, the Middle East, China, India, and the Americas. Along with these larger, denser, agricultural societies, wealth inequality began to climb.

Others might not acknowledge that, but we can certainly see it in their behavior. We can observe it in the clothes they buy, in the houses they choose to live in, and in the gifts they give. Above all we can perceive it in the constantly shifting standards for what counts as “enough.” If you have ever received a raise, only to adapt to the new level of income in a few months and again begin to feel as though you were still living paycheck to paycheck as before, then you can experience it in yourself. As your accomplishments rise, so do your comparison standards. Unlike the rigid columns of numbers that make up a bank ledger, status is always a moving target, because it is defined by ongoing comparisons to others.

We make social comparisons to all sorts of people on every type of occasion, yet we mysteriously manage to find ourselves on the top half of the Status Ladder again and again. We find it most comfortable to reside there. Consider for a minute how accomplished you are at your job. How intelligent are you? How moral? How loyal a friend? Are you a good driver? Deep down, you know that you are better than the average person in all these respects. In fact, the majority of people know deep down that they are better than average at most things. Which, as far as anyone can tell, is not strictly possible. Why do we care so much about status? These tendencies are evolved rather than learned. If people really are born caring about equality, then we should be able to find evidence of it even in young children. For example, one study asked pairs of children to help an experimenter clean up some blocks. As a reward, the experimenter gave them some stickers. Sometimes the rewards were equal, and sometimes one child received more stickers than the other. Even though they could not yet verbalize that the unequal share was unfair, the children became visibly upset when they received less than their partner. As every parent of preschoolers knows, they do not need to be taught that receiving the same amount is fair but receiving less is unfair. It may take time to learn to count, but they seem to have an innate notion of fairness.

The human brain is wired to look for threats ― a trait that kept us alive when we were living on the savannas but that can prevent happiness in our modern lives. This is so-called “negativity bias” can keep you focused on what’s going wrong (which explains why complaining is such a popular pastime). To break out of this neutral rut, train yourself to acknowledge when things go right. If you keep a calender or a journal, make a point to write down what went well. If you’re more of a verbal processor, start your conversations with friends by sharing a recent win (anything that gives you that yesssss feeling). Where the mind goes, reality follows. The more you appreciate life, the more reasons you have to celebrate it.

Identity Theory views a person as situated in a larger social context and variable over time and space. Accordingly, the definitions of individuals in binary terms (e.g., extroverted-introverted etc.) are overgeneralized since their traits can vary in contradictory ways and even within a single individual. Further, identity theory recognizes the investment of a person in pursuing a community of the imagination, a desired community that offers possibilities for an enhanced range of identity options in the future. By looking at the language learning process through the lenses of identity theory, we turn the old model upside down. Language learning rarely is a matter of “second culture learning,” since that term implies not only a monolithic community, which does not exist, but also that every learner identifies with a target culture in the same way. We should be reminded of the view of language as utterances in which speakers, in dialogue with others, struggle to create meanings. This view is not one of language learning as a linear path from “point A to point B” on a map, but rather _______________ that may never have an “end point”.

The manner in which an idea or assertion is stated affects the way we conceptualize the idea. If language is intelligence, then our intellect is framed, shaped, and organized in large part by linguistic entities. On the other hand, many ideas, issues, inventions, and discoveries create the need for new language, as annual revisions of standard dictionaries show. Can we tease this interaction apart?

Words shape our lives. Lakoff’s poignant book on framing reminds us of the importance of language and verbal labels in molding the way people think. The advertising world is a prime example of the use of language to influence, persuade, and dissuade. Isn’t it odd that in a grocery store there are no “small” or even “medium” eggs, only “large” (which now seem sort of average), “extra large,” and maybe “jumbo”?

Euphemisms abound in every culture. Garbage collectors are “sanitary engineers”; toilets are “rest rooms”; slums are “substandard dwellings.” And when it comes to reporting on military conflicts, deaths are referred to as “collateral damage,” and commando SWAT teams are called “peace-keeping forces.” Politicians have recently decided that the phrase “tax cuts” does not garner nearly as much sympathy as the phrase “tax relief.”

Lexical items may reflect something about _________________________. The verbal labeling of color, for example, affects the way a cultural group perceives colors. Zuni has one term for yellow and orange, suggesting that Zuni children conceptualize these two colors as one.

While it is hard to determine the extent of economic inequality in ancient times, we can guess that it was extremely high. Most large ancient agricultural societies had a king or other ruler with the power to command vast fortunes. On the low end of the social scale, the majority of ordinary people were peasants, and slavery was commonly practiced. In modern history, income inequality reached its highest point in the late 1920s, immediately before the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed—its highest point, that is, until today. We have now reached the same level of inequality that existed prior to the Great Depression.

If humans are not unique when it comes to caring about status, one distinction that we can claim is that we have built social ladders of such height that they dwarf those of our primate relatives and ancient hunter-gatherers. This quantitative difference sets the stage for conflicts between the scale of inequality in which we evolved and the scale that we confront today.

So much depends on how we understand the disparities between the haves and the have-nots. If you ask people whether they believe there is too much inequality or not, their answers will be biased by their own positions. People who are struggling will tend to say the level of inequality is excessive, but those who have benefited from the current system will state that it seems to be working just fine. How can we establish how much inequality is “too much”?

Lera Boroditsky offered an even more vivid description of language and thought among the Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal community in Australia: Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms—north, south, east, and west—to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like “South-southeast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”

Beyond words, the way a sentence is structured can affect nuances of meaning. Loftus discovered that subtle differences in the structure of questions can affect memory. For example, after viewing a film of an automobile accident, subjects were asked questions like “Did you see the broken headlight?” in some cases and in other cases, “Did you see a broken headlight?” Questions using the tended to produce more false recognition of events. The presence of the definite article led subjects to believe that there must have been a broken headlight whether they saw it or not.

The most famous early proponent of language as the “shaper of ideas” was Benjamin Whorf, who made a strong claim for what has come to be called linguistic determinism: “The grammar of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity.” In more recent years, cultural psychologists have presented compelling evidence of Whorf’s views with evidence around the world, but they also readily concede the implausibility of a simple unidirectional influence.

The evolutionary process works on the genetic variation that is available. It follows that natural selection is unlikely to lead to the evolution of perfect, ‘maximally fit’ individuals. Rather, organisms come to match their environments by being ‘the fittest available’ or ‘the fittest yet’: they are not ‘the best imaginable’. Part of the lack of fit arises because the present properties of an organism have not all originated in an environment similar in every respect to the one in which it now lives. Over the course of its evolutionary history, an organism’s remote ancestors may have evolved a set of characteristics ― evolutionary ‘baggage’ ― that subsequently constrain future evolution. For many millions of years, the evolution of vertebrates has been limited to what can be achieved by organisms with a vertebral column. Moreover, much of what we now see as precise matches between an organism and its environment may equally be seen as constraints: koala bears live successfully on Eucalyptus foliage, but, from another perspective, koala bears cannot live without Eucalyptus foliage.