72.
Lateral thinking refers to the following EXCEPT_________.
A.
seeing the implications of what you are saying B. exploring the alternatives for
what you are saying
C. improving one’s logic in
thinking
D. improving one’s perception in thinking
C
As thousands of overseas students do
battle with the English language in schools across the UK, many face a
struggle with a culture for which they are totally unprepared.
Misunderstandings can occur, which, if not sorted out, can ruin a student’s
trip.
Much of this is a result of false
thinking and expectations of British families and the way they live. Last
summer in a college in Kent, Ali, a Middle East
student in his forties wrote before his arrival to request a family willing to
discuss the day’s news, no meat in his food and no alcohol. Then, after his
second day in England,
his host rang the college to say he wouldn’t eat the food she’d cooked for him.
In fact, he had bought some food and asked her to cook it for him.
The college solved the problem by Ali
taking lunch and evening meals at the college, where he could try out the food
by eating a little at a time, and only take breakfast with his host. And it
worked! “They later got on like a house on fire,” said Tony, one of his
British classmates. “He had just not got on with the food.” EFL (English as a
Foreign Language) communities can be tightly connected - when a Japanese student was shot dead
in the United States some years ago after mistakenly entering the wrong house
in fancy dress on the way to a Halloween party, and did not understand the word
“freeze!”, the US
became a no-go area. After the event the Japanese stopped all their courses and
the US
was declared “unsafe”.
So concerned has the UK EFL industry
become to improve students’ understandings about the British culture that the
British Council carried out research among foreign students to determine what
they felt were the most important factors in their stay. They found that,
although EFL courses were heavily praised, what concerned students was the
quality of host families and welfare during their stay.
The result of their study helped to
produce a Homestay Code of Practice. Since its launch earlier this year, some
20,000 certificates have been sent out to host families who have signed the
Code. It has also been sent to 1,000 overseas travel agents. The aim is to make
it serve as an international quality assurance scheme.