【辉太郎杀G大队】8/4 作业by Applemango

ApplemangoUID: 2661244

OPIC: ISSUE208 - "The way people look, dress, and act reveals their attitudes and interests. You can tell much about a society's ideas and values by observing the appearance and behavior of its people."
WORDS: 555
TIME: 01:05:00
DATE: 2009-8-5 下午 08:55:24

It is compelling to believe that the way people look, dress and act enable us to judge the attitudes and interests of them, and their appearance and behavior provides us a fast way to tell the ideas and values of a society. I generally agree with this assertion as the outer aspects always play an important role for us to understand people and the society. However, we can not merely rely on these things, because sometimes they also can lie, many other ways should be used to judge a person or a society.

At most of the time, we rely on the way people look, dress and act trying to find out their attitudes and interests, and it really works. When a fashion designer and an investment banker walk together on the street, it is very easy to tell them out from their outer aspects. The designer always dresses freely in fashionable jeans and shirts because his work is to work without restriction, create imaginative things and lead the fashion trend. While the investment banker is required to dress in suits; he should speak, look and act in a professional way which makes him more reliable and convincing in front of his client.

However, those outer things sometimes can lie on us especially the person tries to hide his real opinions. In the TV series <Lie to me>, the doctor, who is the expert to find people's insights through
the slightly changes of their expressions, way of speaking and some other aspects, successfully finds the real killers of each case and helped the police department to find the reality. Without professional analysis, sometimes we will be cheated by those way of look, dress and act if the person intents to disguise himself.

Knowing the weakness of judging people from their outer aspects, we have to find many other ways to understand the ideas and values of a society rather than merely relying on observing the appearance and behavior of its people. We can easily tell the features of Islamic society as traditional and religious from the veils and religious performance of the Islamic women, but we cannot tell the difference of Shih Islam and Sunni Islam from the similar veiled women. To understand the society better and deeper, we should know more about the Koran, research on their dramatic history, and distinguish the different cultures of the two factions. And it is difficult to tell the ideas and values of the America because it is a country of immigrants and influenced by multi-culture. The American born Chinese has the American spirits as democracy and freedom, but their appearance and behaviors sometimes are still deeply affected by their Chinese ancestors and these will definitely mislead the research on the American society. Thus, many sociologists research more on many aspects of a society from fields of politics, history, culture and economics to tell its ideas and values rather than on its people.

To sum up, the outer aspects of people provide us a short cut to understand people’s attitudes and interests, and those things help us to get the brief view of society. However, sometimes those outer aspects are unreliable and misleading. We have to get right answers by means of researching on other aspects. Appearances and actions are real and they also can be puzzling.