Family structure is the core of any culture. A major function of the family is to socialize new members of a culture. As children are raised in a family setting, they learn to become members of the family as well as members of the larger culture. The family provides the model for all other relationships in society. Through theobservations and modeling of the behavior of other family members, children learnabout the family and society including the values of the culture. Familystructure and their inherent relationships and obligations are a major sourceof cultural difference.

        The family is the center of most traditional Asians' lives. Many people worry about their families' welfare,reputation, and honor. Asian families are often extended, including severalgenerations related by blood or marriage living in the same home. An Asianperson's misdeeds are not blamed just on the individual but also on the family—includingthe dead ancestors.

        Traditional Chinese, among many otherAsians, respect their elders and feel a deep sense of duty toward them.Children repay their parents' sacrifices by being successful and supportingthem in old age. This is accepted as a natural part of life in China. Incontrast, taking care of aged parents is often viewed as tremendous burden inthe United States, where aging and family support are not honored highly.

        The Vietnamese family consists of peoplecurrently alive as well as the spirits of the dead and of the as-yet unborn.Any decisions or actions are done from family considerations, not individualdesires. People's behavior is judged on whether it brings shame or pride to thefamily. Vietnamese children are trained to rely on their families, to honorelderly people, and to fear foreigners. Many Vietnamese think that theiractions in this life will influence their status in the next life.

        Fathers in traditional Japanese familiesare typically strict and distant. Japanese college students in one study saidthey would tell their fathers just about as much as they would tell a totalstranger. The emotional and communication barrier between children and fathersin Japan appears very strong after children have reached a certain age.

        Although there has been much talk about"family values" in the United States, the family is not a usual frameof reference for decisions in U.S. mainstream culture. Family connections arenot so important to most people. Dropping the names of wealthy or famous peoplethe family knows is done in the United States, but it is not viewed positively.More important is a person's own individual "track record" ofpersonal achievement.

       Thus, many cultural differences exist infamily structures and values. In some cultures, the family is the center oflife and the main frame of reference for decisions. In other cultures, theindividuals, not the family, is primary. In some cultures, the family'sreputation and honor depend on each person's actions; in other cultures,individuals can act without permanently affecting the family life. Somecultures value old people, while other cultures look down on them.

(Adapted from R. L. Oxford & R. C.Scarcella, "A Few Family Structures and Values Around the Globe")

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} The Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Ohio did the study. It was published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. The study found a sixty-three percent increase in the number of people treated for rock climbing injuries in American hospitals.

    The study said forty thousand people were treated in emergency rooms. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} The ankle was the most common body part to be injured.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} The average age was twenty-six. Fifty-six percent of the injuries were to people twenty to thirty-nine years old. Women made up twenty-nine percent of the injured population. That is more than that in past rock climbing studies.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} But many people think it is worth it. John Bachar said rock climbing felt like being on another planet. Dean Fidelman says it is a continual challenge and a beautiful form of movement. And, for Sarah Bowman, she has just started her way up the rocks.

    Dean Fidelman said that he believes a climber's ego(自我价值感) can be his worst enemy on a rock. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. Like many other sports, rock climbing can be dangerous.

B. Climbers in the study were from ages two to seventy-four.

C. The most common injuries were broken bones and sprains in legs and feet.

D. They try to move as silently up the wall as they can.

E. A recent study shows a sharp increase in rock climbing injuries between 1990 and 2007.

F. There's no other sport where you're really going up and down.

G. He said rock climbing is a high risk sport in which many people overestimate their abilities and underestimate the rock.

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    Now Glen doesn't like to think what might have happened had he and his best friends, Ray Wightman and Chris Johnson, picked their usual path along a rocky outcrop－the faster route to Johnson s home on Triangle Mountain. They were heading there after school that day－April 14, 1999－to play street hockey in Johnson's driveway. There were other lucky twists, too: not stopping at the shops to get a cola« as they usually did; hearing the strange cry.

    It was 3:30 pm. The three teens were laughing and talking when suddenly they heard a strange cry coming from the ditch(沟渠) across the road. Crossing to take a look, they found an Adidas gym bag sitting deep in the icy water. They climbed down the steep bank and pulled the bag from the water, expecting to find abandoned cats or dogs inside. Instead, the boys found a trembling newborn girl. Wrapped in an old blanket, wearing a thin nightshirt, she was almost blue, her lips shaking from the cold and her crying.

    The boys couldn't have been more astonished. They knew this one needed to get warm and dry, although they didn't know much about babies. Ray dug through his gym bag and wrapped her in a T-shirt. “We didn't know what to do,” said Glen. “I didn't think any of us had really held a baby before.” So the three stood beside the ditch, dumbfounded, taking turns to hold the baby to their chests to keep her warm.

    “We knew it was no use walking up to Ray's house, because his mum was working and no one would be home. We figured we'd have a better chance just staying by the road and flagging down someone.” So they stood there and waited.

    A car drove by and the boys caught the driver's attention, telling her that they had found a baby. The woman then drove off to get help. When the police and ambulance came 20 minutes later, the teens were told the baby was probably two or three hours old and had perhaps been in the ditch for an hour or more. They were also told that they had saved her life and that given 10-20 minutes more in the cold water, she probably would be drowned.

    Many people don't consider their breakfast without a glass of milk. Right now, cows, buffalos, goats and sheep provide most of the world's milk. But soon, people could get milk from roaches(蟑螂).

    That isn't as crazy as it might sound. New research shows this “milk” is super-nutritious. What's more, some scientists have already begun referring to a lot of insects as source of milk.

    In 2004, Subramanian Ramaswamy started studying milk crystals found inside the roach. At the time, he was teaching biochemistry at the University of Iowa City.

    To learn more about the milk crystal from roaches, the scientists used X-rays to look at the atoms in it. The data basically revealed the chemical recipe of the roach crystal. They showed that roach milk is a “complete food”. It contains sugar with a fatty acid stuck to it. Fatty acids are the building blocks of fats. The protein in the milk is also full of essential amino(氨基的) acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Since our bodies can't produce the “essential” ones, we need to get them from our food. And so do baby roaches.

    Barbara Stay, a biologist at Iowa University, also worked on the new study. She says the new data show that the roach milk is “three times more nutritious than cow's milk and four times more nutritious than buffalo's milk”.

    Ramaswamy would like to see roach milk turned into a protein supplement to feed hungry people. But not everyone is confident that it can be done.

    Marcel Dicke studies insects as a potential source of human food at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Dicke says this is a “sound study”. However, in his opinion, “Extracting(提取) milk from roaches can only likely be done in a destructive way with only small quantities”. That means you'd have to raise and kill many bugs to get even tiny quantities of the milk.

    It's nothing unusual for people to multitask nowadays. But the ability to do a number of things at the same time could be different between the two sexes.

    A team of UK researchers recently compared the performances of 120 women and 120 men in a computer test about switching(转换) between tasks of counting and shape recognition.

    Men equalled women when tasks were done one at a time. But when the tasks were mixed up, there was a clear difference. According to the paper published in the journal BMC Psychology, both women and men slowed down and made more mistakes as the switching became more rapid. But men were slower, taking 77 percent longer to answer, while women took 69 percent longer.

    To make the experiment more connected to day-to-day life, researchers tried a second test. A group of women and men were given eight minutes to complete a series of everyday tasks, such as finding restaurants on a map, doing simple math problems, answering a phone call, or deciding how they would search for a lost key in a field.

    Once again, women performed better than men in the test, especially in the key-searching task.

    Where do women get the ability to keep organized under pressure better than men? Researchers believe that it has its origins in evolution(进化). In ancient times, women had to keep an eye on children while cooking meals. Meanwhile, men only needed to focus on hunting.

    However, as with all studies, the results don't necessarily apply to every single person in the world. "We don't mean that men can't multitask, or that only women can," researcher Keith Laws of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, told BBC News. "We are saying that the average woman is better able to organize her time and switch between tasks than the average man."