page 35. Sample answers 5 You and your friends are taking photos in a park. You are posing and your friend is holding a camera. After a flash, your friends holds his hand with fingers pointing up and palm facing out. Index finger and thumb make an ‘O’. a He is saying ‘OK’. b He is asking you to pose again. Other: 6 Your daughter and you are going shopping. You want to buy a new skirt for your daughter. You pick up a blue one and show it to her. She shakes her head from side to side. Then you pick up a red one. She nods her head up and down. Your daughter a likes the blue skirt. b is satisfied with the red skirt you chose. Other: 7 All of your family are enjoying a big dinner on Mid-Autumn Day. After the meal, you lean back and pat your stomach with the palm of your hand. You mean: a Oh, I am full. It’s quite delicious. b I have got a stomach-ache. Other:
Sample answers 1 a 2 b 3 a 4 a 5 a 6 b 7 a Skills building 3: organizing a report
In this part you will learn how to organize information for a report properly and how to sort it into four main sections.
sections.
3. Let’s go over the guidelines, and check our answers, and then number them in
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the logical order.
Answers 8 4 2 6 3 5 1 9 7 Step 3: writing a report on body language
In this part you will write a report on body language based on the information we have collected in steps 1 and 2.
1. Please read the guidelines on page 37, so you will have what should be written in mind.
2. Please review the results you have collected and record the answers by using the form in Part 1.
3. Let’s go over each step suggested in Part 2 and write the report. Sample answers In this report the writer talks about body language used in both China and the United States. It looks at how the same gesture is used in the two different countries and how the gesture expresses different meanings in the two countries. It also states the similarities and differences of body language in these two countries. The information was collected from my classmates through a survey. In order to conduct the survey, I created some situations and answers for some common gestures for my classmates to respond to. After collecting their answers, I recorded their answers and analyzed the statistics. From the outcome of my survey, we can see that for most of the gestures, people in both countries share the same meaning, as with the gestures of the head nodding up and down, the head shaking from side to side and thumbs up. There are also some differences in the meaning of some gestures. For example, there are differences in the meaning of the gesture of waving, when the palm faces out and the hand moves left and right. In the USA it means ‘Hello’, but in China it means ‘No’, a negative answer. Nowadays, some young Chinese also use this gesture to greet others. So with the increase in cultural, educational and economic exchange between the two countries, the differences in body language between the two nations will become smaller and smaller. 7
These results suggest that people from different cultures more or less can understand each other by using these gestures. It seems that in the future we can make full use of body language to help us convey our ideas or feelings when we talk with foreign friends.
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