Every country tends to accept its own way of life as being normal one and to praise or

criticize others as they are similar to or different from it.And unfortunately, our picture of the people and the way of life of other countries is often a distorted one.Here is a great argument in favor of traveling abroad and learning foreign languages.It is only by traveling or living in a country and getting to know its inhabitants and their language that one can find out what a country and its people are like.And how different the knowledge one gains this way frequently turns out to be from the second-hand information gathered from other sources! How often we find that the foreigners whom we thought to be such different people from ourselves are not very different after all.Differences between peoples do, of course, exist and, one hopes, will always continue to exist.The world will be a dull place indeed when all the different nationalities behave exactly alike, and some people might say that we are rapidly approaching this state of affairs.With almost the whole of Western Europe belonging to the European Economic Community (EEC) and the increasing standardization this brings about, plus the much greater rapidity and ease of travel, there might seem some truth in this—at least as far as Europe is concerned.However this may be, at lest the greater ease of travel today has revealed to more people than ever before that the Englishman or Frenchman or German is not some different animal from themselves.

1.The passage is mostly concerned with the issue of ____.

A.advantages of the EEC

B.attitudes towards other countries

C.learning foreign languages

D.differences among people

2.According to the author, ____.

A.our knowledge of other cultures are always wrong

B.reading books about other countries is the safest way of understanding their peoples

C.there are more similarities than differences among different people

D.there are more differences than similarities among different people

3.Some people think that European peoples are identifying themselves with each other because of the following EXCEPT _____.

A.the establishment of the EEC

B.the greater rapidity and ease of travel

C.the increasing standardization

D.the rapid industrialization

4.The clause “However this may be” suggests that ____.

A.the author is going to introduce a new idea

B.the author is about to avoid any conclusion

C.the author is about to give up his own point of view

D.the author will stick to his own point of view

5.The passage seems to attach importance to ____.

A.the greater ease of travel nowadays than before

B.the uncontrollable tendency to identification

C.the similarities in terms of way of life between different cultures

D.the differences between European peoples and other nations