Culture

America V India

 This slide is about when a friend shows up at your house uninvited in India vs America

Section 1)

1) Culture is how people go about doing things in life. It's pretty easy to define culture if someone has visited more than 1 country, but to a person who's been living in Massachusetts their whole life, they would have a hard time describing culture.

2) I agree with all the slides about singularity and individuality. United States is based on individual votes and rights, while eastern civilizations are all about community.

3) If I had to describe US culture in 4-5 sentences, the first thing I would think of is false security. People come to United States because they want to become rich or famous, and they think our culture makes it easy for them to do that, because we are supposed to be welcoming of new ideas and new things. However, US culture states its hard for someone to be very successful because of millions of people competing to do the same thing.

Section 2)

1) We might use our memory to make sense of a foreign place because we could use our outside knowledge or try using our culture to make sense of whats going on.

2) When I was in France, i ordered a soda and it came out to 5.50 euros, which is around 7 dollars. I didn't know why it was that high, so I remembered that Spain has an import tax on coke. They did this to stop people from gaining weight unless they had a lot of money and didn't mind spending it. I assumed this was why it was so expensive in France too.

3) We can use our memory to decipher something because we've learned a lot in school about other cultures so if we assume something its safe to assume. There are lots of limitations to using our memory because we cannot make sense of something by just using what we know. We have to learn new things or find a way around it.

Section 3:

1)

Why TOK?

Picture taken in Ferguson, Missouri

One reason why IB wants students to take TOK is they want students to know "why they know." After all, the course is called Theory of Knowledge. Everyday, we want to know the ways of knowledge, why some people do what they do. TOK helps us by forcing us to be rational and not being biased, but to thoroughly examine a situation, and use what we know to find out the motives behind something. The IB wants students to be caught up in current events, and the recent events at Ferguson are a perfect example. In Ferguson, a young male named Mike Brown was killed by a police officer. TOK students would be able to examine why the police officer killed Mike Brown. TOK gives students the power of knowledge.